EDIT: This post is no longer relevant! Please refer to the Vimeo API setup instructions instead

Today is my 30th birthday. On my way out to lunch, I got this note from Vimeo

Hi Eric,

Just wanted to let you know that we’ve disabled your Tubepress application on Vimeo because we discovered that you are hardcoding the API key and secret into the app.

The result? Every single TubePress Vimeo gallery in the world now shows up completely blank. Happy birthday!

Here’s the deal. Every time TubePress, or any 3rd-party app, contacts Vimeo, it needs to authenticate itself using a pre-shared secret. This is in place to prevent abuse of their API, and in principle I understand their need for a safeguard like this. But my goal has always been to make it easy for you, my customers, to get up and running with Vimeo quickly. Thus, I indeed hard-coded a Vimeo “key” into TubePress. Today this key was disabled.

It’ll take me some time to put in an elegant solution, but here’s how to get your gallery up and running right now.

  1. Log in to Vimeo. You’ll have to create an account if you don’t have one 🙁
  2. Click here to register yourself a new key. Here’s what my registration form looks like (click to enlarge)

  3. Make a note of your “consumer key” and your “consumer secret”. Here’s what mine looks like

  4. Edit tubepress/classes/org/tubepress/url/VimeoUrlBuilder.class.php. You’ll want to insert your consumer key and secret into lines 152 and 171, respectively. Just replace the keys that are there now. Here’s what the lines look like

Is this a hassle? Absolutely. Am I peeved about this? Hell yes. Is there anything else I can do? Not that I can think of. These are the rules set out by Vimeo, and unfortunately if we want to use their service we will have to comply.

Please use the support forum if you need assistance with any of this. As per usual, TubePress Pro users will get priority support. I’m sorry for the service disruption, but I hope you’ll agree that I did what I did to make it easier for you to use TubePress.

Now, I need a beer.

1 Comment to “ How to fix your Vimeo gallery (and why it’s broken)”