/arstechnica/authors

POST /api/arstechnica/authors

Price: 10 credits

Get an Ars Technica writer by slug, numeric id or author archive URL: display name, staff job title, work email, the full biography, portrait, personal homepage, the social profiles linked from the bio and the id of the matching account on the Ars discussion forum.

How to use it

Fetch a single Ars Technica writer. Accepts the author slug as it appears in https://arstechnica.com/author/{slug}/ (one word, no hyphen between first and last name, for example 'ryanwhitwam'), the numeric id returned as wp_author_id or author.id by arstechnica/articles, or the full archive URL. Returns one item with name, alias, job_title, email, description (bio), image (portrait), homepage_url, forum_user_id and the twitter/bluesky/mastodon/linkedin/instagram/youtube URLs found in the bio. To list what the writer published, call arstechnica/articles/search with authors=[alias].

Parameters

• access-token string required

Request body

• timeout integer — Max scrapping execution timeout (in seconds) (default: 300; min: 20; max: 1500)
• author string required — Ars Technica author slug, numeric id or author archive URL (examples: "ryanwhitwam", "https://arstechnica.com/author/ericberger/", "45959"; minLength: 1)

Response

• @type string (default: "ArstechnicaAuthor")
• id integer required
• name string required
• alias string required
• web_url string nullable
• job_title string nullable
• email string nullable
• description string nullable
• image string nullable
• homepage_url string nullable
• forum_user_id integer nullable
• twitter_url string nullable
• bluesky_url string nullable
• mastodon_url string nullable
• linkedin_url string nullable
• instagram_url string nullable
• youtube_url string nullable

Errors

• 422 — The request body did not validate Check the fields against this schema. A URN with the wrong prefix is the most common cause.
• 408 — The request ran past its time limit Raise `timeout` in the request body, up to the maximum this endpoint documents. Lowering `count` or turning off the `with_*` flags also helps, because less work finishes sooner.
• 412 — Author not found (well-formed but nonexistent slug, id or URL) Retrying will not help: either the entity does not exist, or the input points at a different one.
• 429 — Too many requests: a rate limit or a usage window is exhausted When the response carries an X-Retry-After header, wait that many seconds and retry: the same number is in the body as `detail.retry_after`, and the limit clears once that window passes. The message in the body names the limit that was hit.
• 500 — Something broke on our side Retrying will not help. If it keeps happening, send us the X-Request-ID from the response headers.
• 529 — Rate limit reached, or the endpoint is overloaded Wait at least 30 seconds, then retry.

Response headers

• X-Error — Error message text (present only on error)
• X-Request-ID — Unique request identifier
• X-Execution-Time — Execution time in seconds
• X-Result-Count — How many records the body carries. 0 means an empty result, which is a normal answer and not by itself an error. A non-zero count can come back together with X-Error when the failure happened partway through — read this header and X-Error independently.
• X-Total-Available-Results — How many records exist for this query, when the endpoint can say. On a `dry_run` request this is the answer and the body is empty. It saturates: the endpoint's documented maximum means 'at least that many', any smaller number is exact.
• X-Warning — Present when the request body carried keys this endpoint does not document. They were ignored, so any filter you meant to apply through them did not apply. Check the spelling against this schema and retry.
• X-Retry-After — Seconds to wait before retrying. Present only on 429.