jsonfeed.org has announced a new format for web site feeds, designed as an alternative to RSS. TrozWare has had an XML RSS feed for years, but I don’t think anyone ever uses it (I certainly don’t), so today I have replaced it with a JSON feed, which you can access through the button at the top of every page.

I am sure many JSON Feed viewers will appear soon, but the only one I know about so far is at http://json-feed-viewer.herokuapp.com . As soon as this update to my site goes live, I will apply to have TrozWare added to the list of sites on this page. Meanwhile, you can paste in the URL: https://troz.net/feed.json.

This site is constructed using Jekyll, so I am very grateful to Niclas Darville for his very easy to follow guide . However it is still well worth reading through the official specs to see what else you want to add, or if you want to remove anything. I had to tweak a few settings to make it work for my configuration, and I added some more objects, but Niclas got me off to a flying start.

Two things to watch out for:

1. Make sure your feed is producing valid JSON (I had an extra comma that was breaking it…).
2. As third-party apps & sites may be displaying your content, you need to make sure that you are not using relative URLs for images and internal links. I was using relative image URLs like /images/WorkHelp1.png but that showed a broken link in the feed viewer, so I have changed all such links to /images/WorkHelp1.png. Hopefully that will work correctly on my local test server as well as when published.

JSON Feed offers a nice icon which I would have liked to use, but I could not work out a way to make it play nicely with the existing icons on my pages which all use Font Awesome icons. So I ended up just using the existing Feed icon. Hopefully Font Awesome will soon add a JSON Feed icon to their already impressive list.

If anyone still wants to use the RSS feed , it is no longer linked to the buttons at the top of the pages, but you can access it manually.