What the heck is an API?

Not everyone is a super nerd, so we’ll briefly explain what all the API stuff is, in simple terms.

That said, we’ll start off all nerdy. API stands for “Application Programming Interface”. In simple terms, it is a way that a software company can allow other software companies to access their service. In this case, the service is the rewriting engine of ChimpRewriter.

So, the ChimpRewriter API allows other software authors to access our rewriting engine remotely. This is completely independent of the ChimpRewriter software, so you don’t even need to have it installed for this to work! This grants the third party access to spin and rewrite text on your behalf. All you need to do is give them your account email and API key for security reasons.

The third party software will take your content, send it up to the cloud where the ChimpRewriter API will do its magic and send back the rewritten or spun version. After this, how the content gets used depends on what product you are using.

To keep it simple here’s an example of what our popular partner WP Robot would do, using it with their RSS module:

  • Go to the blog or RSS feed where the original article is
  • Grab all the text from the article
  • Send it up to the ChimpRewriter API
  • Wait for the ChimpRewriter API to send the text back (usually about 0.05 of a second)
  • Post the rewritten content to your blog

Depending on your account, you get enough credits to do this hundreds of times in a day!

So now you know what an API is. Now what’s all this nonsense about a “query”? Lets say your account has 100 queries (or requests) per day. This means that another piece of software can make a request to the API on your behalf 100 times per day. Each time it contacts the Chimp Server, one query is deducted from your account. There are a couple of options that incur “extra” query cost. So one submission may deduct 2 or 3 queries is you are using some of the advanced options. Right now, these are Spin Tidy and Instant Unique which incur these extra costs.

To get started with the API so other software can spin content on your behalf, click here, or to sign up for a ChimpRewriter Pro account with included queries, click here.

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