Dave Winer has made it easy to install your own “listicle”: a Web page that cycles through chunks of text one chunk at a time. For an example, see the listicle Dave created to display Doc and my New Clues clue by clue.

The text comes from a JSON file that you can of course alter. Take a look at the JSON file in a text editor and you’ll figure it out. A couple of things to know:

• Be sure to end each quote with a comma, except the last one.

• If your chunks contain any double quotes, put a backslash before them. Otherwise, the JSON will think it’s come to the end of a chunk and it will get confused.

• Because JSON can be finnicky, check what you’ve done at a site like JSON Formatter. (I broke Dave’s New Clues listicle for a while because I neglected to check my file after I added a dropped clue…and forgot to put a comma at the end of the line.)

Dave has not only made it easier for people to use his work and to make it their own, it’s a good project to learn some coding with. And it’s a great example of the sort of software-that-makes-us-freer that Dave’s urging us to recognize, share, and appreciate.

Categories: free-making software dw