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.