Step by Step Guide to Delicious OAuth API

Introduction  

After merging with yahoo, Delicious's account registration is done using yahoo account. Moreover OAuth has been introduced for accessing Delicious's API. A guideline has been provided in Delicious's help page at  http://delicious.com/help/oauthapi describing the steps to use their API, but that is not so very illustrative. Also, no readily usable sample project or dll is available on the internet. So I have decided to write a sample application for accessing Delicious's OAuth API.  

What is OAuth?

OAuth (Open Authorization) is an open protocol that allows users to share their private resources (e.g. photos, videos, contact lists) stored on one site with another site without having to hand out their username and password.

OAuth allows users to hand out tokens instead of usernames and passwords to their data hosted by a given service provider like delicious, twitter, linkedin etc.
Steps to call Delicious API

Following are the steps to make a successful API call to delicious using OAuth.

  1. Get an API key
  2. Get a Request Token
  3. Get user permission to access their data
  4. Get an Access Token
  5. Create the request for Delicious
        1. Building the “Base String”
        2. Generate the signature
        3. Make the request
  6. Refresh Access Token for future API calls without authorization

1. Get an API key  

To access any API using OAuth, a consumer/API Key and a consumer/API Secret Key are required. These can be obtained from Yahoo! Developer Network (YDN) API key form. Fill up this form appropriately and set the access scope eg to which of the yahoo owned site(s) you need API access.

Read more: Codeproject

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