Jekyll JSON Feed plugin

A Jekyll plugin to generate a JSON feed of your Jekyll posts.

Installation

Add this line to your site's Gemfile:

gem 'jekyll-json-feed'

And then add this line to your site's _config.yml:

plugins:
  - jekyll-json-feed

⚠️ If you are using Jekyll < 3.5.0 use the gems key instead of plugins.

Usage

The plugin will automatically generate a JSON feed at /feed.json.

Optional configuration options

The plugin will automatically use any of the following configuration variables, if they are present in your site's _config.yml file.

title or name - The title of the site, e.g., "My awesome site"
description - A longer description of what your site is about, e.g., "Where I blog about Jekyll and other awesome things"
url - The URL to your site, e.g., http://example.com. If none is provided, the plugin will try to use site.github.url.
author - Global author information (see below)

Optional front matter

The plugin will use the following post metadata, automatically generated by Jekyll, which you can override via a post's YAML front matter:

date
title
excerpt
id
tags

Additionally, the plugin will use the following values, if present in a post's YAML front matter:

image - URL of an image that is representative of the post (can also be passed as image.path)
banner_image - URL of an image to use as a banner, like those used on Medium
author - The author of the post, e.g., "Dr. Jekyll". If none is given, feed readers will look to the feed author as defined in _config.yml. Like the feed author, this can also be an object or a reference to an author in _data/authors.yml (see below).

Author information

TL;DR: In most cases, put author: [your name] in the document's front matter, for sites with multiple authors. If you need something more complicated, read on.

There are several ways to convey author-specific information. Author information is found in the following order of priority:

An author object, in the documents's front matter, e.g.:

author:
  twitter: benbalter

An author object, in the site's _config.yml, e.g.:

author:
  twitter: benbalter

site.data.authors[author], if an author is specified in the document's front matter, and a corresponding key exists in site.data.authors. E.g., you have the following in the document's front matter:

author: benbalter

And you have the following in _data/authors.yml:

benbalter:
  picture: /img/benbalter.png
  twitter: jekyllrb

potus:
  picture: /img/potus.png
  twitter: whitehouse

In the above example, the author benbalter's Twitter handle will be resolved to @jekyllrb. This allows you to centralize author information in a single _data/authors file for site with many authors that require more than just the author's username.

Pro-tip: If authors is present in the document's front matter as an array (and author is not), the plugin will use the first author listed.

An author in the document's front matter (the simplest way), e.g.:

author: benbalter

An author in the site's _config.yml, e.g.:

author: benbalter

Meta tags

The plugin exposes a helper tag to expose the appropriate meta tags to support automated discovery of your feed. Simply place {% json_feed_meta %} someplace in your template's <head> section, to output the necessary metadata.

SmartyPants

The plugin uses Jekyll's smartify filter for processing the site title and post titles. This will translate plain ASCII punctuation into "smart" typographic punctuation. This will not render or strip any Markdown you may be using in a title.

Why JSON Feed?

Great question and I'll leave it to the spec to answer:

The JSON Feed format is a pragmatic syndication format, like RSS and Atom, but with one big difference: it’s JSON instead of XML.

For most developers, JSON is far easier to read and write than XML. Developers may groan at picking up an XML parser, but decoding JSON is often just a single line of code.

Credit where credit is due

This plugin is heavily inspired by the Jekyll Feed plugin plugin. So much so, that it is a fork with JSON tweaks. Big thanks go to @benbalter for creating the Jekyll Feed plugin, licensing it under the MIT license and making it so easy to create this plugin (it took me an afternoon whilst I was doing other things).

Contributing

Fork it (https://github.com/lildude/jekyll-json-feed/fork)
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create a new Pull Request

jekyll-json-feed

Development

Runtime