Preview: River of News in JSON

http://daveriver.scripting.com/index.json

by davewiner • 16 years ago

7 14 16 years ago

daveriver.scripting.com

My personal river without the formatting. Made to plug into any kind of rendering anyone can think of. I'll be writing this up in a post soon, but the software is ready to go now. :-)

BarkMore2• 16 years ago

The host is refusing connections on port 80.

davewiner2• 16 years ago

Had to fix something for a minute. It's working again. Sorry for the outage.

jerf• 16 years ago

Pity we can't go back in time and specify something like this in JSON as the actual format for RSS. It would have prevented a lot of drama. (Not all of it, but a non-trivial amount of it.)

BarkMore2• 16 years ago

It's working for me now. Can bodies and titles contain HTML markup?

Groxx4• 16 years ago

O...kay? Why is this news-worthy?

Was there XML previously? They're the same thing, they just use different parsers.

Was there no programmatic access previously? How about a link to where they announce this omg-new-way-to-read-News-River? Scraping looks like it would be simple enough, so I doubt lack-of-JSON-access prevented people from writing anything for changing News River's display.

Is this meant to be public? Will it go away? Why do we want News River in the first place? What is the point of this post?

nir2• 16 years ago

Don't know the point of this post, but anything that's code or output of code gets my vote over the "everything I need to know about startups I learned in Kindergarten" submissions.

Groxx4• 16 years ago

Why support the lesser of two evils when you don't need either?

jacob_riis2• 16 years ago

It was not XML previously.

I will write a blog post soon explaining, but I wanted people to have a look first.

I believe it's totally newsworthy, but of course YMMV.

Groxx4• 16 years ago

The blog post I'll probably end up reading if it makes it to the front page of HN. I don't often look at the new stuff (sorry, but it's true).

But as-is? It's a 1-1 duplicate of the main page (though it does separate by source) in a different format, and a strange extra layer in the JSON:

  { updatedFeeds:{updatedFeed:[{feed item}]}, metadata:{} }

Why updatedFeeds.updatedFeed[]? There's nothing else in updatedFeeds.

edit:

There's also the inconsistency that updatedFeeds.updatedFeed[x].item may be an array or an object, depending on how many items are by that source. Inconsistency == increased edge-case code == less happy users of the data.

It seems a barely-thought-out representation of the data, nothing I'd want other people to see.

davewiner2• 16 years ago

http://scripting.com/stories/2010/12/06/innovationRiverOfNew...

atheken• 16 years ago

Just pushed something more generic to heroku last week..

Http://jsonr.heroku.com

Converts any XML feed to JSON or JSONP. Docs coming very soon.

Preview: River of News in JSON

Related Stories