@dgold hey… So… Like I said, I made some changes to the base repo. Check them out and see if they make sense.
Also, I was trying to get the json feed working, but I didn't get it right in the end. Here's the code if you want to build on it. -> https://gist.github.com/nitinthewiz/965f602b7e68676c4d71e86021216835
I used Manton Reece's jsonfeed for wordpress plugin for inspiration since it doesn't make sense to import any other libraries for such a small task - https://github.com/manton/jsonfeed-wp