Until now, Tagalus has allowed two methods to interact with the service – via the website, and via Twitter. This gave users a fair amount of flexibility in how they interact with the service, depending on their needs.
Today, we’re announcing a new way to interact with Tagalus: an API.
As of now (version 0001), the API allows for most of the functionality that the website offers, including creating tags, definitions, and comments, and of course fetching them as well. What isn’t available is anything related to creating or editing users, for obvious security reasons.
In regards to authentication and security, all methods relating to fetching data are available without authentication. Methods that create data require that the client app provide an API key. API keys are provided to each user – you can find your key by going to the User Details page on Tagalus (you have to be logged in, obviously). API keys should be kept secret, but in the event that one becomes insecure, a new key can be generated on that same key. Be forewarned that this will make the old API key invalid. This will be the authentication method of choice for the time being – it is possible that it will be deprecated in favor of OAuth in the future, but it seems unnecessary at this point.
API limits will not be throttled for the time being, but we reserve the right to adjust that in the future.
Also, the API will be published and modified in versions. As to not break applications when changes are made to the protocols, client apps will be able to specify which API version they would like to use. At a certain age, old versions of the API may be deprecated, but the goal is to have at least the current version, plus the revision or two before it available all the time.
To read more about the API and learn how to use it, visit the Tagalus API Documentation
Tags: API