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Comment by jackowayed | Hacker News Reader

OAuth is also a huge pain for those "I just want to write a little Twitter API script in 5 minutes" things. To the extent that I've thought about writing a couple lately, but chose not to because I didn't want to deal with OAuth (and they were scripts I'd want to work in the future).

It seems like there should be some solution that lets me use basic auth for those little scripts. Maybe tell Twitter IP's from which I want to be able to use basic auth? It would be a bit of a pain since most people have dynamic IP's, but it would be better than nothing, and it would at least make it simple to run basic auth scripts on my VPS (which obviously has a static IP).

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One pain point I've had since switching from Basic Auth has the lack of debugging via a terminal and curl. That was pretty useful.

For Ruby-minded folks there's http://github.com/marcel/twurl which is effectively curl that uses OAuth - though it isn't the same.

John Nunemaker wrote a tutorial on how to get get up and running with OAuth pretty quickly (though it is for the Ruby/Rails audience) http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2009/03/29/oauth-explaine... .

I'll admit getting started with OAuth takes some time to ramp up at first, but that ramp up time gets smaller each subsequent app.

I wrote http://github.com/decklin/curlicue for precisely this reason. It's kind of a hack (shell script!), but I've gotten some mileage out of it.

It really couldn't be much easier with the twitter gem, and it's way easier to clean up after an "oh shit I left credentials in that public script" moment; just re-generate the secrets on the twitter site.

https://gist.github.com/cfc477a0c5895e8bd1bd

Wrote this when I was drunk to prove a point.

An opt-in, per user, enable of basic auth might be a nice thing, but probably a hassle for them to implement.

I made a fun little app for this: http://simpleauthtwitter.heroku.com/ it's not very complicated, but it might help.

For a single-user use case you could use http://dev.twitter.com/pages/oauth_single_token which doesn't require you to go through the OAuth token acquisition dance.

There's an oauth curl to write script quickly with oauth and curl http://code.google.com/p/oacurl/

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