Primary Unit

I added support for JSON Feed to my homemade static site generator Majestic today, and thought I’d note it because funnily enough the two implementations mentioned by John Gruber (by Niclas Darville and Jason McIntosh) used the approach I’d taken for generating my RSS feed and wanted to avoid.

Basically all three of those define a document template and pass in the posts and other required bits, and you’re done. I’m really not knocking this — again, I do this with the RSS feed and it validates fine. It’s all good.

But I ended up templating my RSS feed like this because I looked at the feedgenerator module and ran away. Majestic was my first Python project of any real size and I wanted to keep things as straightforward as I could. While it looks (with hindsight) reasonably OK in use, it doesn’t have any documentation, has been pulled out of Django, and has funky class names (Rss201rev2Feed) that didn’t fill me with confidence that I could implement an RSS feed quickly.

I was using Jinja templating for the site and since HTML and XML are cousins just did that. But you can probably tell that I didn’t really know what I’m doing (still don’t!) with escaping as any field that might contain non-Ascii characters is wrapped in <![CDATA[…]]> tags.

But hey, it works. Feed’s valid.

With JSON, everything just feels much more obvious. In Python you hand off basic types to the built-in json module and you get back a string, all the encoding taken care of. And if I make a mistake Python will complain at me, instead of just dumping out a file of questionable worth.

I think this is what all the people complaining on the Hacker News thread missed. Working in JSON is comfortable and familiar — the tools are good and you get told when something goes wrong. Working with XML can be unclear and a bit of a pain, and creating an invalid document is a risk.

So my super-duper advanced JSON Feed implementation is… constructing a dict, adding things to it and passing it off to the json module that I use all the time. Taken care of. The code’s so boring I’m not even going to include it here (but it’s online to view).