Turning API Forum Posts into Blog Stories

by Kin Lane on 03/05/2012

I’m always looking for new, relevant ideas to write blog posts on for the CityGrid Developer blog. I have several topics I write about regularly including new projects I’m working on, new releases around the API, and what I find during my local, mobile and social landscape analysis.

However it can be hard to find topics to write about that are relevant to CityGrid developers, or publishers as we call them. To help write blog posts that are useful to my API community I started harvesting ideas and topics from actual forum posts from developers.

Earlier today a publisher submitted a forum post stating their concerns about the age of some of the reviews they get along with businesses, when making requests against the CityGrid Places API. It was an easy question to answer, since CityGrid also provides a business reviews API, that will give you more control how you can pull reviews for a zip code, neighborhood or specific business.

Using the topic that was posted on the forum I was easily able to create a quick blog post framing the question and providing a detailed answer explaining how the CityGrid Reviews API provides a solution.

Now CityGrid publishers can potentially be exposed to this solution via the blog, RSS feed and since I actively syndicate my blog posts, they will see it if they follow CityGrid on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and also using a search engine.

When evangelizing for an API, I feel it is important to try and provide as helpful content as you can via an active blog presence, while also reverberating it across the multitude of channels your developers might be listening on--turning relevant forum posts into stories is a great way to do this.