JSON Feed, a New Feed Format for the Masses

JSON Feed, a New Feed Format for the Masses

May 23, 2017 18:20 EST • Alexandre Vallières-Lagacé • 2 minute read

Web developers and web innovators have to keep up with the times and often old standards have to be replaced by other newer, better, simply format. This is exactly what is happening to the old RSS feed (or the even weirder ATOM) standard with the new JSON Feed standard. Replacing XML and all it’s complicated attributes, enclosures and weird nesting alternatives is this new format with a simple JSON document that represents your latest content in an easy and simple parsable format.

XML is simple for writers, podcasters and bloggers since it’s been here for a long time. But it’s not an easy thing to work with for makers of new tools or software that can interact with it. That’s why Brent Simmons and Manton Reece have put together the new JSON Feed format. It’s much simpler and streamlines easy to grasp specifications. Most knowledgeable web developers could implement it on their platform of choice in matters of minutes.

I sure did for the Jekyll platform. I build a ’feed.json’ file that can be dropped in any Jekyll project and it will generate the feed for you. It has support for tags, header images and link posts. If you like it and can think of something, I’m missing send me a pull request and I’ll make sure to update my little feed.

Over the course of the last few days, we have seen a validator and online renderer pop-in and many client libraries for various technologies. Maxime Vaillancourt built his JSON Feed Viewer in one hour. Just look at the list of nice tools the devs have already written here.

Hey, Implement it!

A standard is only as good as its widespread adoption so please, implement it in your CMS, projects and tools. This way we might be on the road to something much nicer than the old RSS feed format.

For the moment, you can subscribe to Hipster Pixel’s JSON Feed right here!