Dist::Zilla::Plugin::Twitter gets an OAuth update

My pluginbundle for Dist::Zilla includes, among other things, the Twitter plugin so I can brag on Twitter every time I release a module. Mysteriously, it broke one day. Looking at the code, I realized that it was sending my username and password to authenticate. I remember being uneasy with that at the time I set it up, but I quickly forgot, and continued along blithely. OAuth is an authorization standard that allows users to avoid giving their username & password to a potentially-untrusted application. Using OAuth has been requested since 2011, and the 401 Unauthorized error I got indicates that now it is mandatory for Twitter.

David Golden offered to let me maintain the module, and I’m a sucker, so… :D

Another word on namespaces

Kent Frederic’s recent post about Dist::Zilla minting profiles was a great overview of the subject, but because I try to follow best practices, I was struck by the section “A word on namespaces.”

Kent recommends that if you’re making an author pluginbundle, you should name it Dist::Zilla::PluginBundle::Author::$CPANID. This extra bit of namespacing makes life easier for many people in many ways. I was immediately convinced that he was right, and moved my author stuff into appropriate author namespaces.