Understanding the Patch News API

AOL's Patch.com is a hyperlocal news portal that provides comprehensive and trusted local content to its users, and is powered by editors, writers, photographers, and videographers who live nearby.

Patch has a huge editorial team as well as freelance bloggers that help create original content, and which is published to a network of more than 850 sites. Patch local content includes news, events, business listings, photos, videos, and announcements. The geotagged hyperlocal content is available for third-party consumption via the Developer API at http://developers.patch.com/, which we will use to build our PacktNews app.

Before we move further towards building our app, lets us have a good look at the API calls provided by Patch.com and their structure. The Patch News API has the following four main components:

• Authentication

• Taxonomy (Categories)

• Finding stories by location

• Finding locations by name

Authentication

Any app or website that intends to use the Patch...