---
published: true
layout: post
title: Making Sure My API Roundup Stories Are Machine Readable By Designing Them As APIs.json Collections
image: https://s3.amazonaws.com/kinlane-productions2/bw-icons/bw-collection.png
author:
  name: kinlane
tags:
- Design
- Collections
- Stories
- APIs.json
- Collection
- APIs
---
Making a list of valuable APIs has been a staple of my tech blogging for 10 years now, and as I work to find even more meaningful ways of defining the API space, I’m pushing the envelope on how I do API roundup stories. Instead of just finding a handful of valuable APIs, and providing an HTML list of them, I'm going to use [APIs.json](http://apisjson.org/), to make sure all of my collections are machine readable by default.

For each API I profile, it is valuable to have a nice logo, name, short description, and a link to the developer portal. However I want to also make sure other valuable, machine readable resources are also present like Twitter, Github, and Blog RSS. This is just the start, I want each API to also have a machine readable API definition using Swagger and API Blueprint as well--all indexed using an APIs.json file.

I’m using APIs.json in two ways, as an index for each API, as well as an index for the overall collection I’m building--you will find the overall collection using the big {A} below, and each API has its own little {A}. To show you this in action, here is an [SMS API collection](http://sms.apievangelist.com/) I've built:

[![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/kinlane-productions2/api-commons/api-commons-icon.png)](http://sms.apievangelist.com/apis.json "Collection APIs.json") ![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/kinlane-productions2/api-evangelist/t-shirts/KL_InApiWeTrust-1000.png)

SMS API Stack