Introduction to the Course

Get familiar with blogging and the Blogger API and this course's intended audience, prerequisites, and learning outcomes.

We'll cover the following

A blog, also known as a weblog, is a website for information sharing. Blogs are intended for various target audiences and may encompass topics such as food, music, politics, and sports. A blog consists of posts that allow the blogger to express an opinion, provide information, and present a sequence of activities, the latter in reverse chronological order. Blogs come in various types, including personal blogs, video blogs (also known as vlogs), corporate blogs, and others.

Blogger API v3

In this course, we’ll explore the Blogger API that allows us to manage our blog content conveniently. The Blogger API allows us to create, update, and delete blog posts and blog pages. Moreover, it lets us retrieve blog information—such as posts, pages, views, and so on—from a number of public blogs, which we can use for business and personal purposes.

What is an API?

An API is a software gateway that allows different software components to communicate with each other. APIs help expose the capabilities of an application to the outer world, allowing for programmatic access to their data.

Consider the case of a service like Blogger that allows for creating and managing blogs. Building and exposing an API for this service will enable others to programmatically fetch the data this service offers, such as the list of blogs published by a particular user.

We can provide examples of other popular services that provide APIs for extended use cases. Widely used services such as YouTube, Reddit, Google Maps, and others provide APIs that allow authorized clients to access the resources provided by these systems.

This course is designed for anyone interested in exploring the Blogger API and its integration. Whether you are interested in building the Blogger API into new applications, integrating it into existing applications, or learning more about the Blogger API in general, this course is for you! It will provide you with an understanding of the various endpoints that Blogger API offers with hands-on examples.

To take this course, a basic understanding of the following is required:

  • APIs and how they work.
  • The JavaScript programming language.
  • React, a JavaScript-based free and open-source front-end library.
  • A basic knowledge of HTTP request and response formats.

By the end of the course, we’ll be able to:

  • Understand the different endpoints of Blogger API, their usage, and their structures.
  • Create and manage blogs, blog pages, and blog posts.
  • Explore a simple web application developed in React, coupled with Express backend and integrated with Blogger API.