Any app or website that intends to use the Patch News API must obtain authentication. The authentication is a combination of your developer key, secret key and the current timestamp, all combined together and converted to a MD5 hash key. Unfortunately, the core platform for Windows Phone 7.5 does not support MD5 yet; however, there is a Silverlight MD5 implementation available from MSDN at http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/SilverlightMD5 that we will use to perform the authentication for the Patch News API. The following is a snippet of code to get the MD5 hash via the MD5Managed class within a simple Windows Phone app:

public MainPage()
{
InitializeComponent();
string key = "xxxxxxxx";// Get key and secret from
//http://developers.patch.com/
string secret = "xxxxxxx";
inttimeInSecs = (int)(DateTime.UtcNow newDateTime(1970,
1, 1)).TotalSeconds;
MD5Managed md5 = newMD5Managed();
byte[] bs = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(key + secret
+ timeInSecs);
byte[] hash = md5.ComputeHash(bs);
StringBuildersb = newStringBuilder();
foreach (byte b in hash)
{
sb.Append(b.ToString("x2").ToLower());
}
stringurl = "http://news-api.patch.com/v1.1/nearby/
37.785368,-122.441654/stories?dev_key=" + key +
"&sig=" + sb;
Debug.WriteLine(url);
}

Patch organizes news stories into three main taxonomy types:

These taxonomies are further classified as:

The Patch News API supports location-based search for stories, by using any of the following parameters:

Patch News API supports a location retrieval API call that accepts a text string and returns well-formatted location information, something similar to the GeoNames API and/or reverse geocoding.

The result of the query includes the UUID as discussed in the previous segment; this is useful if you are building an offline application, for example, an application for San Francisco city that uses the San Francisco UUID hardcoded in the application. Another use case would be to store content offline tagged with the UUID.

Locations to be queried could be any of the following parameters:

Full documentation can be found at http://developers.patch.com/docs/.