I'm doing some work integrating SlideShare with ColdFusion. SlideShare has a rather simple API, but no matter what I did, I kept getting an API failed validation. Turns out the error was rather simple.

Part of the API requires you to hash a secret key and a Unix time stamp. My code looked like so:

Turns out the result needs to be in lowercase for it to work right. When I lcased the result, the API started working immediately.

I'm blogging this for two reasons - others may want to work with SlideShare as well (I'm going to see if I can release any of my code), and while i can't say where, I'm pretty sure I remember some other API having the exact same issue.