TLDR; Spigot has a new JSON feed for posts, and you can find it here: https://spigotdesign.com/feed/json. Our Portfolio feed is here: https://spigotdesign.com/feed/json/?post_type=portfolio

I still love RSS

Ever since I discovered RSS I embraced the technology and incorporated it into my life. As the years have passed and RSS continued to lose support among the bigger players, I’ve maintained what systems I could to keep my feeds full. For many of those years that meant hosting my own Fever feed database on my server. That is until about 6 months ago when we upgraded the server to run PHP 7 and Fever stopped working. I’ve since replaced Fever with Reeder 3 for both desktop and iOS, connected to a Feedly account to keep it all in sync. And I use it every day.

Unlike Steve Gillmore – who proclaimed Rest in Peace, RSS way back in 2009 – Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed (?) are not a ‘realtime CMS’ for me. I don’t use Facebook. Twitter is great, but unless I watch it constantly, I miss 90% of what comes through. And FriendFeed? What ever it was is no longer here. But RSS is.

The death of RSS?

For those of us who cherish our RSS feeds these past few years have felt like dark times. The death of RSS has been announced basically since the day it was spec’d, and not helped by Steve’s post or Google killing off Google Reader. But I’m very thankful that the vast majority of feeds I’ve subscribed to over the years have been continually maintained. My tools have changed, but my feeds have largely remained the same. The death of RSS? Pashaw.

Fancy new Feeds

Over the past month or so I’ve been hearing rumblings about a new feed spec that is simpler and easier to implement than RSS. Brent Simmons and Manton Reece introduced it on May 17th, and I heard about it from John Gruber the same day. There have been drippings of news and support ever since.

Last week Reeder 3 released a new version that has JSON feed support. Are we staring at another golden age for feeds? Feedly has yet to support JSON feeds, and given their responses on Twitter it’s not looking likely:

It may be time for me to move on and get a Feedbin account, who recently announced JSON support:

One of the criticisms I’ve seen of JSON Feed is that there’s no incentive for feed readers to support JSON Feed. This is not true. One of the largest-by-volume support questions I get is along the lines of “Why does this random feed not work?” And, 95% of the time, it’s because the feed is broken in some subtle way. JSON Feed will help alleviate these problems, because it’s easier to get right.

Long live RSS. I mean JSON.