API overkill

geoff on 2006-04-22T15:17:22

although I'm probably the last person on the internet to do so, the other day I started cross-posting my personal photos to flickr. of course, didn't want to do anything by hand, so I went off to CPAN looking for an API. there were a few to choose from, but Flickr::Upload caught my attention as being somewhat simple... but the process that followed was anything but - register for an API key from flickr, figure out this auth key thingy (which I still haven't), the download a slurry of dependencies (which included an Acme:: module, and which ended when I saw CPAN.pm wanted to install SOAP::Lite). all this just to upload a picture every once in a while? granted, I'm sure the full API offers much, much more, but for my immediate needs, no thanks.



so, a bit of wandering through flickr showed they have an email upload option. so MIME::Lite, 10 lines of code, and 5 minutes later and I'm uploading photos. sometimes you need an uber API, and sometimes you don't...

so, will I start to receive photo spam as spammers hit random @flickr.com email addresses and stumble upon my upload address? hmm...

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Indeed

acme on 2006-04-24T11:05:30

I've started resyncing my photos to Flickr and it is a real pain. Amazon's S3 service does something similar with the authentication and it's very annoying too. The problem is that these nice simple web services start adding more authentication and then become a real pain to develop for. It doesn't help that Flickr::API and Flickr::Upload have minimalist documentation either. Bah!

Re:Indeed

link on 2006-06-08T16:21:03

Flickr::API may not have a heap of documentation but the flickr api website isn't too bad.

Mind you the api is a bit silly. Why on earth do I pass some dates in mysql format and some as unix timestamps? Why can the api call not tell when I pass in junk? You can pass anything you like in and it still returns success.

Ug.

hex on 2006-04-24T14:18:04

What Acme module was involved? That's just wrong.

Re:Ug.

geoff on 2006-04-24T14:22:42

Acme-Steganography-Image-Png somewhere in the process - it's not listed in Flickr::Upload's prereqs...

Re:Ug.

muttley on 2006-04-24T15:57:42

I wrote Net::FS::Flickr which requires Acme::Steganography::Image::Png (for reasons that are obvious if you read the docs of the module)

Are you sure you weren't trying to install that?

Re:Ug.

geoff on 2006-04-24T16:12:36

I know I saw your module, but I don't think I tried to install it via CPAN.pm, and it's not in my cpan build directory. but it doesn't really matter to me - I wasn't trying to come down on cpan dependencies (or a dependency on an Acme:: module) - it was just a bit of a rant, really :)