I have done some further investigation of using JSON and Jekyll. I think JSON is not the best format for maintenance. This is because it is messy including chunks of text (e.g. for additional info on the project). Also it does not allow any comments. The format is rather strict, with lots of quotes needed, and brackets and braces.
I think we should use YAML for the raw data, and (if necessary) extract a subset into a JSON file for external consumption. As to Jekyll: Jekyll can equally use a YAML data file, so it is not a problem changing to YAML. At present the attic-test PoC includes a single JSON data file which is processed in a plugin script that generates the individual page data. This works well (and it looks like BuildBot supports the use of Jekyll plugin scripts - other sites such as GitHub may not) But I think it would be better to have a separate YAML file per project. Jekyll can process these as part of a collection. This avoids the need to use a plugin to generate the pages. I think it also makes it a bit more obvious what is going on (each output file has an input file) And the YAML body can contain arbitrary markup to be added to the generated page. This would make it easier to preserve the extra information present in some of the existing xml files A question: On a tablet, would it be harder to maintain one file per project rather than a single large file? i.e. instead of updating projects.json one would need to create/update a projects/project.md file.
