Back in May, Kevin Cox posted an excellent article concerning a subject on which I’ve written from time to time: the need for your personal site to offer one or more content feeds for use by those with feed reader apps and/or services. If you haven’t seen the article, I recommend it highly.
Only thing is, I disagree with one point he made early on in the article.
You see, this site provides both RSS and JSON feeds (linked from their respective icons at the bottom of each page on the site), and I’ve noted those are both good choices for others’ sites, too. However, Cox’s article recommended against the JSON Feed format because it is “less widely supported.” (He also said to avoid a few other older or obscure formats, and I concur with him on those.)
So, in the Hacker News thread which had tipped me off to Cox’s article in the first place, I commented:
Agree that RSS is imperative; don’t agree about excluding JSON feeds. One can do both.
. . . to which Cox himself replied:
One can, but I’ve found little value to this. What are you giving your readers with JSON feeds that the RSS or Atom feed isn’t giving them?
. . . prompting this from me:
Some prefer it. It offers another two or three fields that RSS doesn’t.
In any event, it requires virtually zero extra effort after initial setup, so I see no reason not to offer both. Different strokes…
And now, months later, I have an additional answer to his “What is it good for?” question: I am using the two-feeds approach to give my feeds-savvy readers a choice. “Different strokes,” indeed.
Some folks want to see articles’ entire content in feeds, thus saving them from having to go to the sourced website; but others prefer only a title and short description. (Either method links back to the original, of course.) Until a few days ago, both my RSS and JSON feeds went the entire-content route. Indeed, a JSON feed has to do so, because that’s part of the JSON Feed spec:
content_htmlandcontent_textare each optional strings — but one or both must be present. This is the HTML or plain text of the item.
. . . but an RSS feed has no such requirement. So, now, I have set my feeds as follows for any post featured therein: each feed includes the article’s title and description, but the JSON feed also includes the full content. And, just to cover all bets, the RSS feed notes that those who still want the full content can simply subscribe to the JSON feed — which, yes, is linked from each RSS feed item.
Bottom line: yep, there are good reasons to have both RSS and JSON feeds. Perhaps your site, too, can benefit from a similar approach.
Update, 2022-12-10: Looks like I zigged when I should’ve zagged. See the next post for more details.
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