This is just a quick post listing a few of the jekyll snippets I’m using on this site. I’ve been running this site on github pages for a few years now, and I love how simple it is to setup and how lightweight it is.

1. Show reading time

This shows how much time in minutes it would take to complete reading a post, in the format “3 min read”.

{% assign words = content | number_of_words %}
  {% if words < 270 %}
    1 min
  {% else %}
    {{ words | divided_by:135 }} mins
{% endif %}

2. Auto-load minified sass files inline

So, I came across this snippet when I was trying to find a way to dynamically detect critical above-the-fold css in order to optimize page speed. It doesn’t exactly do that, but close. I don’t have so much css on this site, so I basically load a combined version of my minified sass files inline.

{% capture include_to_scssify %}
    {% include critical.scss %}
{% endcapture %}
{{ include_to_scssify | scssify }}

Also, it was one of the things I did to get a perfect score on Google Pagespeed Insights.

3. Show latest post on home page

Yesterday, I added a section on the homepage that shows the latest post published on this site. I wasn’t sure this was going to be possible but a quick search got me this;

{% assign post = site.posts.first %}
  {% assign content = post.content %}
{% include post-home.html %}

And then in your “_includes/post-home.html”, you add this;

{% if post.title %}
  {{ post.title }}
  {{ post.date | date_to_string }}
{% endif %}
{{ post.excerpt | strip_html | truncatewords:18 }}

Note, I added a “truncatewords:18” to limit the text excerpt. Take it out if you don’t need it.

4. Show recent posts on post page

This basically shows the recently published posts on your site. You can change the limit to modify the number of posts shown.

  {% for post in site.posts limit:3 %}
    {{ post.title }}
    Published on {{ post.date | date_to_string }}
  {% endfor %}

And.. that’s it. Thanks for reading.