Last week Manton Reece and Brent Simmons released a project called JSON Feed, news of which quickly made its way around the part of the Internet populated mainly by software developers. It's a new standard for content syndication on the Web--like RSS, but cleaner. It's a cool idea: XML (on which both RSS and Atom are based) isn't just ugly, it's also really irritating to parse. While it's a new spec and nobody's sure it will ever catch on in the mainstream of Web publishing, it seems like it's a reasonable guess at what might be the way forward in a world where the open Web needs defenders. In an effort to get behind that idea publicly (and also just because I think it's cool), I decided I'd add a JSON feed to this blog, available here.
Initially, I thought it might be a fun weekend side project to write my own feed generator for Pelican, and I was all set to do so. Then I discovered that Ryan M at ryanmo.co had already published a json_feed Pelican plugin on GitHub, so I just grabbed his code and went to town. No need to reinvent the wheel.