For the past few days I’ve been setting up this blog, and one thing i noticed the lack of was a proper referencing system, something to help me and my potential readers sift through what I aim to be hundreds of post entries. I was missing a categorization and tagging manager.

The only restriction is the same one I’ll be aiming for down the line:

• can I do it using only statically created content?

As it turns out, Jekyll already has some tools for the job right out-of-the-box, they just needed a little bit of fiddling with to meet my use-case :) Off the bat, the folder hierarchy of posts will be translated into categories, and there’s a tags meta field that you can use when writing your posts, so all that’s left is parsing that information when dynamically building your pages. But how do you go about that? Fortunately, Jekyll also has something called Generators, a class that you can extend in a ruby script and which gets loaded from your _plugins folder. These can be used to dynamically build static pages 🤯

A big shout out goes to this link for putting it all together in a neat little package. I tried several plugins, other similar solutions, and this was by far the least complex and more straight to the point I could find.

# Housekeeping

The final thing I did was cleanup some duplicated code that was already piling up, and thus I learnt about the _includes folder, and how it can be used to abstract similar code.