Distro.Mic: An Open Source Service for Creating Instant Articles, Google AMP and Apple News Articles

Mic is always on the lookout for new ways to reach our audience. When Facebook, Google and Apple announced their own native news experiences, we jumped at the opportunity to publish there.

While setting Mic up on these services, David Björklund realized we needed a common article format that we could use for generating content on any platform. We call this format article-json, and we open-sourced parsers for it.

Article-json got a lot of support from Google and Apple, so we decided to take it a step further. Enter DistroMic. Distro lets anyone transform an HTML article into the format mandated by one of the various platforms.

Distro is an open source npm module (distro-mic) but Anthony Sessa had the idea to also create an endpoint for developers who don’t use Node. The endpoint at distro.mic.com takes HTML and transforms it into the format of your choice: Apple News Format, Facebook Instant Articles, or Google AMP.

Here it is returning Apple News Format:

Daniel Rakhamimov and Serge did a great job on the landing page and endpoint.

Going forward, we hope to make it even easier for nondevelopers to syndicate their ideas to readers on all platforms. Maybe it means creating a public CMS for writing articles and syndicating. We need your help to do this! Fork us on GitHub.

The goal of technology like Instant Articles and AMP is to make the web more easily accessible for readers. Our goal with Distro is to make these services more accessible for writers and publishers. Let us know if it works for you!

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