JSONfeed

More technical stuff, but I’m trying to re-train myself to actually write on this blog, so here goes…

For no good reason other than it was easy, I have added a JSONfeed to this blog. It can be found at http://andrewjaffe.net/blog/feed.json, and accessed from the bottom of the right-hand sidebar if you’re actually reading this at andrewjaffe.net.

What does this mean? JSONfeed is an idea for a sort-of successor to something called RSS, which may stand for really simple syndication, a format for encapsulating the contents of a blog like this one so it can be indexed, consumed, and read in a variety of ways without explicitly going to my web page. RSS was created by developer, writer, and all around web-and-software guru Dave Winer, who also arguably invented — and was certainly part of the creation of — blogs and podcasting. Five or ten years ago, so-called RSS readers were starting to become a common way to consume news online. NetNewsWire was my old favourite on the Mac, although its original versions by Brent Simmons were much better than the current incarnation by a different software company; I now use something called Reeder. But the most famous one was Google Reader, which Google discontinued in 2013, thereby killing off most of the RSS-reader ecosystem.

But RSS is not dead: RSS readers still exist, and it is still used to store and transfer information between web pages. Perhaps most importantly, it is the format behind subscriptions to podcasts, whether you get them through Apple or Android or almost anyone else.

But RSS is kind of clunky, because it’s built on something called XML, an ugly but readable format for structuring information in files (HTML, used for the web, with all of its < and > “tags”, is a close cousin). Nowadays, people use a simpler family of formats called JSON for many of the same purposes as XML, but it is quite a bit easier for humans to read and write, and (not coincidentally) quite a bit easier to create computer programs to read and write.

So, finally, two more web-and-software developers/gurus, Brent Simmons and Manton Reece realised they could use JSON for the same purposes as RSS. Simmons is behind NewNewsWire and Reece’s most recent project is an “indie microblogging” platform (think Twitter without the giant company behind it), so they both have an interest in these things. And because JSON is so comparatively easy to use, there is already code that I could easily add to this blog so it would have its own JSONfeed. So I did it.

So it’s easy to create a JSONfeed. What there isn’t — so far — are any newsreaders like NetNewsWire or Reeder that can ingest them. (In fact, Maxime Vaillancourt apparently wrote a web-based reader in about an hour, but it may already be overloaded…). Still, looking forward to seeing what happens.