Anyone who’s tried to use RSS knows just how fiddly it is, and these days JSON is the de facto format for most things on the web. So – like a lot of people – I read the announcement of JSON Feed with great interest and decided to add a new feed to my site.

Like all good lazy engineers the first thing I did was search the web and find some decent resources, including a couple of blogs belonging to people who have already beaten me to it.

I’m still a bit of a noob when it comes to Hugo, and found that a combination of the template in the first page and some of the information in the second were exactly what I needed - I do reserve the right to keep on tweaking though :)

You can find the two commits I ended up with, on Github:

Basically, I added a template file (layouts/index.json) and an [outputs] section to my config file:

[outputs]
    home = [ "HTML", "JSON", "RSS"]

Then, I added a link to the JSON Feed in my template, so you’ll see this in the top of the index page:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/json" href="https://hackerific.net/index.json">

That, along with making sure Hugo was upgraded to 0.20 is pretty much everything, and my final action was to subscribe to my new feed in Feedbin, my feed reader of choice.

If you use a reader with JSON Feed support, feel free to subscribe using https://hackerific.net/index.json but not that I might tweak things.