Toward a Secret Sky

I was trying to access a Google GData API using Dart in a browser. More for fun than profit, but it posed a few challenges, so I thought I should document them. The first step was to Authorize using OAuth2.0 which is the easiest way of Authorizing an application to use Google APIs. This is pretty trivial using server-side Dart, but I wanted to achieve the entire thing inside a web browser, and so this involves a different OAuth2.0 flow to the web-server flow that I am used to using, in this case the OAuth2.0 Client-side Application Flow . The main difference with the web-server flow is that the entire OAuth2.0 dance occurs in a single step, i.e., there is no step to exchange a code for a token. This single step is performed by asking for a token in the initial redirect step with a response_type parameter of token . Additionally, the client secret is not passed at any time, because this would not be safe information for the client application to give up to a web browser (sin...

It seems over recent months that my blog gets comment spam. I imagine any bloggers out there experience the same thing and it is a bit of a pain. I have three immediate problems with this and blogger.com. 1. Blogger doesn't notify me of all comments at the time they are posted. It notifies me of some, and I have of course configured it to notify me of all comments, but it seems to miss off about 70%. So not only do I not notice the spam, I also miss a bunch of legitimate comments. Please get it together Blogger! Ajax panel configuration is nice, but only if the core functions work. 2. Blogger should/could/might try to stop this spam before it happens. I am not guessing how, but then the company that runs Blogger.com are much brighter than me, and I am sure they have a solution. 3. The interface for browsing comments and deleting many at a time simply does not exist. This would make the task of sifting through, identifying, and delting spam much easier. Now that I have had my grumbl...

Well, you can tell I am procrastinating working today (but you can forgive me after the PIDA GSoc Application was rejected as a mentoring organisation), but I have hacked up an early version of a library (for Python) to manage blogger.com posting. I was becoming slightly upset with Blogger.com, since it does some insane things like puts BR tags in the middle of PRE elements, which meant the syntax highlighting script I wanted to use was going nuts. I also gradually realised that none of the blogging clients work with the "new Blogger.com" although for me (who has only been blogging a few months) it has been the "only Blogger.com". So, with a quick search around for documentation from code.google.com, I was able to discover that Blogger.com uses the google GData API with a bit of Atom mixed in. I have no real ideas about these specifications, but http://code.google.com/apis/blogger/gdata.html explains it. Note that another document I found: http://code.blogspot.co...