API Tape
The no-code platform that tapes APIs together.
The Beginning
When I launched the landing page for API Tape, development speed was the name of the game. I chose Jekyll for my static site generator, Google Cloud Storage for hosting, and Cloudflare for CDN since I'm already familiar with this stack and it costs me pennies every month to host. I wrote content and did some revisions with my good friend Tyler (@Tyloren here on IH), took some GIF screen casts of my prototype with LICEcap, and deployed the site.
What I did not take into account until a couple of weeks later was the site's Lighthouse score. For the uninitiated, Lighthouse is a tool that comes packaged with Google Chrome for auditing a site on four main metrics: Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO. Jekyll does a lot of heavy lifting for this in combination with the jekyll-seo-tag and jekyll-sitemap plugins.
Here was the site's initial score:
Not amazing.
Seeking better scores
Lighthouse is pretty sweet, and you can access it by viewing a site in Google Chrome, opening the development tools, and navigating to the Lighthouse tab.
By clicking the blue button titled "Analyze page load" in the tool, Lighthouse will do it's magic for a few moments and then present you with your page's scores as well as detailed tips on how to improve those scores. API Tape's faults lied within its images and generated sitemap file: I hadn't configured the base URL in the Jekyll config, and I hadn't added alt tags to a few images for accessibility.
Simply by addressing those items, my scores improved dramatically, and I'm hoping that after the new sitemap.xml file propagates the score will be 100 (ignore the ?x=4 in the url, that's a trick I use to invalidate the site's cache to test updates more quickly):
An extremely cool blog I found for Jekyll SEO tips was Juliette Sinibardy's blog article A Beginner's Guide to SEO optimization in a Jekyll static website.
Conclusion
It may seem obvious to some, but small details missed can result in a site that looks great and seems fully operational, but doesn't even make the first page on Google when searching the product's name! In my case, this was because I had forgotten to set the site's base URL in the jekyll config resulting in a bogus robots.txt file. Running a Lighthouse audit can shine some light on issues like this, resulting in your product's landing page getting more exposure. I'm still learning a lot of this stuff, but it has been exciting learning more about SEO on my journey to be a not-terrible marketer!
I had the idea while watching NCIS on my couch a couple weeks ago – on every freelance project I work on, in some way or another, I write code that maps JSON data from one API to the expected data format of another to pipe the APIs together. Wouldn't it be cool to have a small no-code tool that could build and manage these API Adapters very quickly and intuitively?
I'm working on another B2B SaaS product in stealth mode with a partner, and we're finding that while slow and steady wins the race, I wanted to try a smaller-scaled side project and build it in public. API Tape is the perfect candidate for this – it's a simple tool with one purpose, to provde a shim between APIs with an intuitive field mapping interface, and the network calls for the Adapter can be triggered from a Web UI or accessed via an Endpoint URL. This will enable no-coders to interface with APIs that aren't covered by automation tools like Zapier, and could potentially play nice with them.
Hopefully by building in public and sharing the idea for the product through the landing page, the newsletter signups will validate the concept. The tech is already proven, but this time around I wanted to see if anyone wanted this before dedicating the next month or two to build it out.
To anyone reading this, feel free to check out the product landing page and leave any feedback, I'd love to hear from you!
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Sounds like a useful tool. I like the idea of a shim to make it easier to connect systems. Do you think the app will be mostly for JSON mapping, or will you also do things like monitoring or adding a caching layer if an API is rate limited?
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I think for an MVP I'd focus on making the JSON mapping, networking, and credential handling airtight, just so it does one thing really well. I hadn't initially thought of caching for performance from the outset, but I can see how that and monitoring would add 10x more value!
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