This blog now has an API

An API, really ?

Well, sort of.

All posts can now be accessed in a json format (just replace the final / with a .json). This is obviously a read-only API.

For example, my previous post is accessible in json format here.

{
  "id": "/2014/12/27/past-and-future-objectives",
  "title": "2014 learnings and 2015 objectives",
  "url": "http://blog.pixelastic.com/2014/12/27/past-and-future-objectives/",
  "tags": [],
  "date": "2014-12-27 00:00:00 +0100",
  "html": "<p>This is the end of the year, and I do realize now that [...]",
  "markdown": "This is the end of the year, and I do realize now that [...]"
}

It currently exposes the initial text in markdown as well as the formatted HTML text, along with some metadata (id, url, date and tags).

I had a need to have my post in json format for processing them through Grunt, so I thought I might as well expose them publicly. I'm not sure people will ever use it, but at least it does exist !

How was it done ?

Jekyll lets you plug custom made scripts to be called in the generation process in an aptly named _plugins directory. I just had to create a json.rb file that will take every post and create a new json page from them, using a very minimalistic post.json layout.

All I had to do was build the custom object I wanted to return, which was a mix of generated content, and metadata.

Tags : #api, #blog, #jekyll

Want to add something ? Feel free to get in touch on Twitter : @pixelastic