API Evangelist

The source for apievangelist.com — Kin Lane's API Evangelist, studying the technology, business, politics, and people of APIs since 2010.

This repository is the main doorway to the API Evangelist network: the home page, the 5,000+ story blog archive, the guidance areas, and the navigation and agent-native surfaces that tie the whole network of *.apievangelist.com sites together.

What's here

It's a Jekyll site built with the github-pages gem (Jekyll 3.10) and served from apievangelist.com (see CNAME).

Path	What it is
_posts/	The blog — 5,000+ stories ("Stories") going back to 2010. Posts can be future-dated to schedule publishing (see below).
_layouts/	Page templates — default, post, service, and none (for raw JSON/text output).
_includes/	Shared partials — nav (topnav, sidenav-*), footer, newsletter-signup, timelines, and the agent-native ai-toolbar / webmcp toolbars.
_data/	Site data — nav.yml (network navigation), home-sections.yml (home page network map), knowledge.yml, the timeline-*.yml sets, tags.yml, network_areas.yml, and search data.
_network/	Python tooling that builds the areas network graph, distributes agent-native / interlink / SEO surfaces across the sibling info-area repos, builds the aggregate search index, and runs the network-health crawler.
index.html	The home page.
about/, contact/, services/, skills/, search/, timeline/, tags/, archive/, working/	Top-level site sections.
technology-of-apis/, business-of-apis/, evangelism-of-apis/, governance-of-apis/, history-of-apis/, politics-of-apis/	The six guidance areas that organize API knowledge.
well-known/, llms.txt	Agent-native discovery surfaces — .well-known/api-catalog, .well-known/api-onboarding, .well-known/agent-skills-index, and an llms.txt for LLM/agent consumers.

The wider network

The home page and _data/nav.yml link out to the rest of the API Evangelist network, each its own repository and subdomain — for example:

• Discovery — search. · providers. · apis. · rating
• Learning — conversations. · papers. · video. · newsletters.
• Toolbox — solutions. · tools. · standards. · schema. · rules. · policies.
• Alignment — lifecycle. · strategies. · experiences. · vocabularies.

Running locally

bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve

Then open http://localhost:4000. The blog archive is large, so the first build takes a couple of minutes; --incremental speeds up later rebuilds.

Writing a post

Add a Markdown file to _posts/ named YYYY-MM-DD-slug.md with front matter:

---
published: true
layout: post
title: 'Your Title'
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/apievangelist/api-evangelist-images/your-image.png
date: 2026-09-10
author: Kin Lane
tags:
  - Governance
  - OpenAPI
---

Future-dating is by design. A post dated in the future stays unpublished until its date arrives — the daily deploy (below) rebuilds the site and publishes anything whose date has passed, so the blog can be staged weeks ahead.

Deployment

Deployed to GitHub Pages via .github/workflows/pages.yml, which builds with the official jekyll-build-pages action. It runs on:

• every push to main,
• manual workflow_dispatch, and
• a daily schedule at 12:10 UTC — so scheduled (future-dated) posts publish on their date even when nothing is pushed.

_headers and _redirects are kept in the build output for edge-config support.