Simple related posts for Jekyll

May 11, 2021 #jekyll

When looking up Jekyll related posts patterns I found a few automated approaches:

Use the related_posts that’s built in

The docs for related_posts indicate that it should run with the --lsi switch. I decided to try this as generic related posts.
Show posts with the most shared tags

There are several tutorials on how to do this. I didn’t find this particularly useful for two reasons: 1. I don’t use tags, only categories, 2. a difference in one tag can be quite significant.
Use the jekyll-related-posts gem that analyzes content

This semed an alternative to for the built-in method that can be used on Github pages. Since I don’t use Github I didn’t need this.

What I actually wanted is a way to curate specific very related posts, either on this blog or elsewhere, that would be shown with the link, title and the excerpt.

In the end, what I did was add a related attribute to the front matter:

related:
  - slug: jekyll-combining-an-external-folder-into-posts
  - link: https://jekyllrb.com/
    title: Jekyll • Simple, blog-aware, static sites
    description: Transform your plain text into static websites and blogs

Then I added the following to the post.html template:

{%if page.related%}
  <hr>
  <div class="sources">
    {% for source in page.related %}
      {%if source.slug%}
        {%assign related = site.posts | where: 'slug', source.slug | first%}
        {% if related.description != ''%}
          {% assign descd = related.description %}
        {% else %}
          {% assign descd = related.content | strip_html | strip_newlines | truncate: 180 %}
        {% endif %}
        {% include link.html
          title=related.title
          description=descd
          link=source.slug
        %}
      {%elsif source.link%}
        {% include link.html
          title=source.title
          description=source.description
          image=source.image
          link=source.link
        %}
      {%endif%}
    {% endfor %}
  </div>
{%endif%}

link.html is a partial similar to a Facebook or Twitter card and looks like this:

<div class="embed">
  {%if include.link%}
    {%if include.link contains "http"%}
      <a href="{{include.link}}" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
    {%else%}
      <a href="/{{include.link}}">
    {%endif%}
  {%endif%}

  {%if include.image%}
  <div class="image" style="background-image: url({{include.image}});"></div>
  {%endif%}
  <div class="body">
    <div class="content">
      <div class="title">{{include.title}}</div>
      {%if include.description%}
        <div class="description">{{include.description}}</div>
      {%endif%}
    </div>
    {%if include.link%}
      {%if include.link contains "http"%}
        <span class="link">{{include.link}}</span>
      {%else%}
        <span class="link">ognjen.io/{{include.link}}</span>
      {%endif%}
    {%endif%}
  </div>

  {%if include.link%}
    </a>
  {%endif%}
</div>

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Ognjen Regoje But you can call me Oggy

Simple related posts for Jekyll

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Ognjen Regoje
But you can call me Oggy