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.

{
  "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.