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This technique of producing an “API” from directories of json generated by batch jobs and creative use of symlinks can be surprisingly effective. I wrote a simple program to transform a list of RSS feeds into a directory tree that I’ve been using for years as my feed reader API to great effect.

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Yeah, I've always tried to generate RSS feeds when needed rather than on-demand — it strikes me that the ratio of requests to updates must be so enormous that it doesn't make sense doing anything else.

We do this at https://endoflife.date API, and it works quite well.

I really like endoflife! It's great for looking up dates with a consistent UI and also codenames - I could never learn that Debian Bullseye was 11 or all the other silly codenames so I look them up here. Thank you!

We also do something similar on Datatig, which is a tool I'm writing for the general situation of crowdsourcing data in Git repos. It makes it easier for people to submit data and then creates usable data and handy websites. The static website output has an API which is just static JSON files. https://pypi.org/project/DataTig/ or https://datatig.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

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