Some feedback about my Amazon Product Advertising API Signature Generator (yes, I know it needs a better name) has caused me to look at URL encoding in more detail than I ever have before, and it turns out it’s not as straightforward as you might think. Read the rest of this entry »
From 15th August 2009, all requests to Amazon’s Product Advertising API must be authenticated with a message authentication code. This requires that a signature be generated using your secret key and appended to the request. When Amazon get the request, they calculate the signature themselves, and if it matches the signature you sent they know that the message is from you, and that it hasn’t been tampered with en route.
Amazon have been warning developers about that this change since May, but I’ve been putting off doing anything about it, telling myself that there’s plenty of time before it needs to be done. At least until my requests started failing with 400 Bad Request errors and “The request must contain the parameter Signature” messages… Read the rest of this entry »
So I’ve written an application, released it and even written some documentation for it. All I need now is somewhere to keep it. And here it is, my new WordPress site.
It’s more than is strictly necessary to publish details about a single fairly simple application, but in the (more than) ten years I’ve been into home automation, I’ve always found reading about other people’s experiences to be interesting if not inspirational. I’ve often thought it would be a nice idea to write up some of my stuff and give something back and here is my chance. Trouble is, I’m apparently more of a starter than a finisher, so it remains to be seen whether I ever manage to post anything else…