A blog is an essential communication tool for any API operation, providing a simple self-service way for API producers to keep their consumers up to date on any changes. An active blog is a quick way to get up to speed on what an API does and can easily be syndicated via RSS or Atom feeds, and can be used to broadcast to social media.

Also known as: News, Updates, Posts

Example

- type: Blog
  url: https://developers.example.com/blog

Standards

• RSS Advisory Board RSS 2.0
• IETF RFC 4287 — Atom Syndication Format
• IETF RFC 5023 — Atom Publishing Protocol
• JSON Feed JSON Feed 1.1
• Schema.org Schema.org BlogPosting
• Schema.org Schema.org Blog
• W3C WebSub
• IETF RFC 8288 — Web Linking

HTTP Headers

Media Types

• application/rss+xml — RSS 2.0 feed.
• application/atom+xml — RFC 4287
• application/feed+json — JSON Feed 1.1
• text/html — Canonical post format.

Link Relations

• alternate — HTML / RFC 8288
• hub — WebSub
• self — RFC 4287

Governance Rules

• feed-discoverable (House rule) — Each blog index page must declare an `alternate` link to its RSS/Atom/JSON Feed.
• post-has-author (House rule) — Each post should expose an author for schema.org / Atom compliance.
• post-has-published (House rule) — Each post should expose a stable publication date for ordering and caching.

Risk & Compliance

Compliance:

• Accessibility (WCAG 2.2)
• GDPR / ePrivacy — comments, embedded analytics, and email-subscription forms

Security: Blogs are a publication surface — leaked screenshots, draft posts in sitemaps, and unsanitized comment threads are the most common issues. Feed endpoints should rate-limit and avoid leaking unpublished draft URLs.

Tools

• Jekyll — Static site generator (MIT)
• Hugo — Static site generator (Apache-2.0)
• Ghost — Blogging platform (MIT)
• WordPress — Blogging platform (GPL-2.0-or-later)
• Feedly — Feed reader
• WebSub Rocks — WebSub validator

Suggested Metrics

• posts_per_quarter — Cadence of new posts; a leading indicator of program health.
• feed_subscriber_count — Estimated RSS/Atom subscribers (from feed-fetcher User-Agents).
• post_engagement — Page views, time-on-page, and social shares per post.
• time_since_last_post — Days since the most recent post; high values signal a dormant program.

Example Implementations

• Stripe — Engineering and product blogs separated, each with its own RSS feed.
• Twilio — Multi-author developer blog with category feeds.
• GitHub — Changelog-adjacent blog announcing platform-level changes.
• Cloudflare — High-cadence engineering blog widely cited by API operators.

Related Properties

• Change log
• Road map
• Press
• Twitter
• Rss

Tags

• Blog
• Information

All Common Properties