Feedbin Supports JSON Feed!

Feedbin now supports subscribing to JSON Feeds.

JSON Feed is an alternative to the RSS/Atom formats. The great thing about JSON Feed is that it encodes the content as JSON instead of XML. This is good because parsing and writing XML feeds is hard.

The specification has a small surface area and is a great piece of technical writing. You should check it out. If you publish a website, consider offering a JSON Feed alongside your RSS feed.

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.

I also want JSON Feed to succeed because I remember how daunting RSS/Atom parsing were when building Feedbin. If JSON Feed was the dominant format back then, it would have been a non-issue.