I pushed a new version of Twindicate.com live two days ago. That night I was up till 3:45am trying to figure out why OAuth was not working at all. All I could tell was that I was getting a “401 Unauthorized” response from Twitter. I was completely torn apart by this, because I have put hundreds of hours into Twindicate. I honestly thought that Twitter had shut me off without telling me (sorry Twitter).
I tried regenerating my consumer keys, I output lines of debug code at every single step along the oauth code path, I stayed up late two night in a row. I almost cried, I was really choking it back there for a little while. I searched google with no quality results helping me figure out what the issue was.
After 2 days and 4 seperate support requests with Twitter were completely ignored or immediate closed, I went back to the code. I was actually talking with my friend Jason and saw the “body” of the response was encoded. I pulled it out of the response, output it to the page and found the error: “Failed to validate oauth signature and token”. My first response was, “great, tell me something I didn’t know”.
So, I went back to Google and searched for this error. One of the first results was, “Failed to validate oauth signature and token” on Twitter Oauth – Check Your Clock! My first thought, “Ah crap!”.
I checked my clock, it was about 11 hours off. So I fixed it, using the instructions in the Setting the time of your system article.
I am glad that the solution was simple, frustrated that Twitter was not helpful with their support, and sad that my application I spent so much time on is so dependent on something this silly.
Tags: clock, code path, first response, first thought, friend jason, google, quality results, signature, single step, support requests, twitter
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Check the clock is always my first response on the Twitter API development group.
That will be the first thing I look at from now on.