rss

Brian Barrett:

Tired of Twitter? Facebook fatigued? It's time to head back to RSS.

I'm an RSS reader lover, so I hate to admit it, but RSS ain't going mainstream. It was too nerdy 20 years ago and it's too nerdy now. RSS is still incredibly useful technology, but I can't see it taking off alone.

For RSS to take off, it needs some kind of abstraction. Like Flipboard, where you can get started reading stuff right away and feeding it RSS isn't something you need to handle manually. Apple News is kinda like that. I'm a little love/hate with Apple News though. I like reading stuff in it, but I've stopped publishing in it because it became too much work to get right and have it look good. It's like managing a second site, unlike RSS which just brainlessly works when your CMS supports it. A little-known feature of Apple News was that it used to be able to function as an RSS reader, but they removed that a couple of years ago. Boooooo.

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Manton Reece and Brent Simmons have just published their thoughts on JSON Feed which is a new standard for making a feed, like a collection of blog posts. The format itself is similar to RSS and Atom but since it's in JSON it's easier to read and a lot more familiar to developers:

For most developers, JSON is far easier to read and write than XML. Developers may groan at picking up an XML parser, but decoding JSON is often just a single line of code.

Our hope is that, because of the lightness of JSON and simplicity of the JSON Feed format, developers will be more attracted to developing for the open web.

My favorite part about this project? The spec is just so gosh darn easy to read.