Twitter API without libraries – for posting as yourself (e.g. a bot)
I have to say that the twitter API documentation is absolutely abysmal. It’s impossible to navigate – calls make reference to other calls but the major problem is that there are almost no examples – they almost all recommend that you use a library. So how on earth are you supposed to learn how the API works? How do you write a bot which tweets as itself (such as my https://twitter.com/EnfieldTownBot)?
anyway – i found a StackExchange article outlining how to use Twitter’s API from Postman – which handles the hashing for you.
Once I got a good grip on the API itself – which isn’t too bad – I now have to figure out how to create an Azure Function App to create and send the tweets – as OAuth 1.0 requires all messages to be signed (hashed). Twitter has a pretty good set of instructions on how to create the hash: https://dev.twitter.com/oauth/overview/creating-signatures
But – oh my gosh. This is a very complicated process. Here are some samples of libraries or code which i’m looking through to try to implement…
http://developer.pearson.com/learningstudio/oauth-1-sample-code
https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsapps/LinkedIn-OAuth-Example-c06d64f5
https://github.com/bittercoder/DevDefined.OAuth-Examples
https://github.com/bittercoder/DevDefined.OAuth
https://www.devexpress.com/Support/Center/CodeCentral/ViewExample.aspx?exampleId=E20020
anyway, I didnt want to lose these links. I’ll come back to this later.