JSON Blog Feed

As a Blogger, I am quite familiar with the word "Feed". On a personal level, I do maintain a large list of blog feed and I use a software called QuiteRSS every day to get the latest updates from all those sites on regular basis. Simply looking at the name of this application one can easily identify that it is an RSS reader, a very well known and widely supported format of web feed.

Then again, I am also quite familiar with the JSONFeed which is slowly becoming very popular, specially among the tech enthusiasts and people who are into blogging or writing online. As a developer, I find JSON based web feed to be more appealing and logical. It is much more simpler and light weight than XML based RSS feed. Unfortunately though, the world and the tech industry is yet to accept it as the de-facto standard for web feed. Somehow, majority of the population are still stuck with good old RSS feed.

Do not get me wrong, I do like RSS and I have included RSS feed on this very little blog site of mine but lately I am struggling to make a decision on whether I should keep the RSS as my default feed or should I include JSON. I mean, it is definitely possible to keep them both, then again maintaining both of them makes zero sense to me. I think we should have only one of them as it is much more easier to maintain from a developer point of view.

While I was working to build this CMS, it never crossed my mind that I should have a feature on this site that will allow visitors to subscribe to my JSON feed. The word "RSS" was stuck in my brain and I couldn't come up with any sensible reason on why should I include JSON feed to begin with. Not so surprisingly, a very small pool of software developers and bloggers already adopted this standard which is bugging me a lot lately.

I came across few bloggers and some web based feed reader service providing web sites who are allowing their users to submit JSON based web feed. Quite promising indeed. Google accepts RSS feed and I submitted my feed to them earlier. Pretty much everything seems to be working just fine yet Google itself didn't make any call on JSON feed either. At least I am not aware of such notice or blog post from Google that confirms whether they accept JSON feed or not. I may need to wait a bit longer to see what is going on with others. I am very much tempted to include this feature on my site even though it will take sometime to implement it on my blog. One morning I may wake up from sleep and decide to implement it, who knows. Staying positive regardless.