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madrobby / downtime

Standardized JSON API to indicate downtime for apps and services
MIT License
90 stars 4 forks source link

Use RSS/Atom instead of JSON? #1

Closed ktheory closed 11 years ago

ktheory commented 11 years ago

Some status sites already offer RSS feeds as a programatic way to check application status (e.g. heroku, AWS).

RSS has well-known auto-discovery features.

If you're starting simple with your status site by using a publishing tool (Tumblr, Wordpress, Twitter etc), you get RSS for free. Downtime in json would require extra work.

OTOH, JSON is a lot easier to parse than XML. What other advantages does downtime provide over RSS/Atom?

Maybe the real challenge is creating a microformat for describing downtime.

madrobby commented 11 years ago

I'd rather use a really simple JSON API. We could have a converter that reads Atom and generates downtime JSON, probably pretty easy to fix up.

Thomas http://script.aculo.us/thomas http://slash7.com/company

On Dec 30, 2012, at 4:21 PM, Aaron Suggs notifications@github.com wrote:

Some status sites already offer RSS feeds as a programatic way to check application status (e.g. heroku, AWS).

RSS has well-known auto-discovery features.

If you're starting simple with your status site by using a publishing tool (Tumblr, Wordpress, Twitter etc), you get RSS for free. Downtime in json would require extra work.

OTOH, JSON is a lot easier to parse than XML. What other advantages does downtime provide over RSS/Atom?

Maybe the real challenge is creating a microformat for describing downtime.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

madrobby commented 11 years ago

The main reasoning is that it's easy to generate JSON if you already generate RSS, and you can write it easily by hand as well, which is probably what most smaller sites might do. Additionally, we can provide a HTML template that loads the downtime JSON file and generate a nice human-facing status page for free.

westurner commented 11 years ago
  1. There are many existing tools for aggregating RSS/ATOM.
  2. For including structured data in HTML, there is microdata. Schema.org is a well-supported set of microdata formats. (#10)
madrobby commented 11 years ago

I don't want the overhead of having to deal with XML, and this is not about embedding metadata in HTML.