Structured content APIs are fundamental to flexible and future-proofed content. But what are they, and how do they work?

A little bit of background

API stands for Application Programming Interface. Simply put, it's a way for computer programs running on internet-connected devices to interact with each other in a structured and formal way. When you open the Facebook app on your iPhone, it talks to Facebook's API to download your feed. When you load the homepage of Stuff.co.nz, it's talking to Metservice's API to show you the weather forecast. This article you're reading was likely delivered through Hail's API. The consumer makes a request to the API, and it responds with data in a format a computer can understand.

A content API is a way for platforms delivering your content (for example, your website) to obtain the structured data that makes up your content, and display it appropriately for that platform.

But what's the problem?

While it was fine in 2002 to be printing off hard-copies of newsletters and producing one-off content for the end of year report or magazine, it doesn't cut the mustard anymore.

Because your audience is distributed across many platforms, we need a way to deliver our content everywhere. What if you want to use your organisation's content on your website? It's a mess of copying and pasting, wasting a huge number of hours. Perhaps you want to update a piece of content that you've manually distributed around? You guessed it, a whole lot more manual work.

An automated way of distributing content from a central hub is needed. A way for all the different platforms for viewing your content to access and display it, optimised for the device in question.

It's all about structure

Modern content products, like Hail, don't store your content as one blob all together. We purposefully split content into chunks. For articles, we chunk for headline, lead and body, complemented with rich metadata. Images are also stored as entities in their own right, again with a host of metadata like GPS location and the date it was taken. This is important because not every platform your content is accessed on is able to coherently deliver all chunks. You wouldn't be able to enjoy this full article on your smart watch, you probably just want a stream of headlines to check out in full later.

We also need a way to represent relationships between our content. When you're writing an article about the Junior Sports Exchange, you need to be able to quickly find relevant photography to complement your writing. To achieve this, we need taxonomy. Hail implements taxonomy with tagging. You manage tags which represent categories that both articles and images can included in. The photos from the Junior Sports Exchange are probably tagged with Junior Sport, so we just need to run a query for images with that tag and we've got a concise list of images we can draw on.

Introducing: the content API

With a great underlying structure in place, we just need a way for apps to pull out our content. This is where the API really comes into its own. All your website, blog, mobile app, smart watch app or television (just to name a few) would need to do is ask the Hail API for your organisation's published content and it can display it however is best for that platform.

Let's run through an example. Your school has an office television which is just displaying drab black and white notices that nobody engages with. So let's jazz it up a bit with some high quality photography from your Hail organisation. The computer displaying on the television simply needs to run a tag query for images in the Sport tag sorted by recent first through the API and it's got everything it needs to show recently approved sport-related images from the organisation. The best choice here would be to display the high resolution versions of the image full screen, perhaps overlaying the caption to provide context. How you choose to display the content is completely up to you — that's the flexibility you get!

It's not just about now, it's about the future

You might not think you need to structure your content for flexible delivery. Perhaps you're only producing a PDF newsletter once a week, and everyone's happy with it.

The fact is, we don't know what's around the corner. That content you're producing today and locking into a PDF is useless for the content platforms of the future. You'd need to invest an unthinkable amount of man-hours reworking and implementing your content in a structured system. Maybe it's too much work, in which case your organisation's history is lost.

By changing your organisation's content workflow to Hail, your content will be flexible and adaptable, able to reach all platforms your audience expects, while being ready for whatever technologies are hiding around the corner. Set your content free with Hail today.