Atomix

Atomix is an Atom generator that takes a simple JSON format as input. It was created because Atom is cumbersome to edit directly.

Atomix does not attempt to implement all features of Atom. Instead, it attempts to be easy to use for simple use cases.

Usage

npm install atomix
./node_modules/.bin/atomix [spec-file]

You can either specify one input file on the command line or give no arguments. If you give no command line arguments, Atomix will read the JSON spec from standard in.

The generated Atom feed will be written to standard out.

Specification format

The specification JSON looks like this:

{
	"feed": {
		<Feed-global data>
	},
	"posts": [
		<List of posts>
	]
}

Feed-global data

{
	"title": <string>,
	"description": <string>,
	"link": <url>,
	"image": <url>,
	"author": {
		"name": <string>,
		"email": <string>
	}
}

List of posts

The "posts" element is a list of post items. A post item looks like this:

{
	"link": <relative url>,
	"thumbnail": <relative url>,
	"title": <string>,
	"shortdesc": <string>,
	"date": <timestamp>
}

The <relative url> fields above will be resolved by the generator based on the URL given in the "link" field of the feed global data. This way, you can keep links to posts on your site short and sweet and independent of your hosting URL in the specification file, while having them be absolute in the generated Atom feed. If you need to refer to a post outside of your site, simply put in an absolute URL.

The format of the "date" field is what Date.parse accepts, which means it accepts typical date formats you see on computers, for example:

• RFC3339 formatted dates, the standard date format in Atom feeds: 2015-09-30T11:00:00.123Z
• Other ISO 8601 formatted dates: 2015-09-30 11:00:00.123Z (But not, apparently, 2009-W53-7 or 20150930)
• RFC2822 formatted dates: Fri, 21 Nov 1997 09:55:06 -0600

Full example

Given the following JSON input:

{
	"feed": {
		"title": "Feed title",
		"description": "Description",
		"link": "http://example.com",
		"author": {
			"name": "Example Com",
			"email": "[e-mail]"
		}
	},
	"posts": [
		{
			"link": "first-post",
			"title": "First Post!",
			"shortdesc": "First!"
		}
	]
}

Atomix will output this Atom feed:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
	<title>Feed title</title>
	<link>http://example.com</link>
	<updated>2015-09-30T10:19:15Z</updated>
	<author>
		<name>Example Com</name>
		<email>[e-mail]</email>
	</author>
	<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com"/>
	<subtitle>Description</subtitle>
	<generator>Feed for Node.js</generator>
	<entry>
		<title type="html"><![CDATA[First Post!]]></title>
		<id>http://example.com/first-post</id>
		<link href="http://example.com/first-post">
		</link>
		<updated>2015-09-30T10:19:15Z</updated>
		<summary type="html"><![CDATA[First!]]></summary>
	</entry>
</feed>