I’ve launched a new Jekyll website recently, and one thing that I wanted to be able to do on the very first days is to be able to have different URLs for a single post. 🤔
Use-case: I’ve published an article on the blog, but the topic is one that comes
up frequently enough that I want to have it on the FAQ page, but also have
a simple one- or two-word permalink that I would be able to tell someone on the
phone, for example /socializare.
I wanted something that’s based on the post’s file base-name — which seems to be the internal post’s identifier — so that it remains maintainable: I want to be able to grep a post’s name when I decide to change or delete it. It also has to be supported by GitHub’s build process. (I know I can generate the files on my machine, and upload them prebuilt, but, for potential non-tech authors, I wanted to keep the ability to just edit a Markdown file in GitHub web interface.)
The somewhat standard
jekyll/jekyll-redirect-from
didn’t fit because it bases the post associations on the final generated path,
not the post name.
The posts get their permalink generated based on their date and other meta-data, so I need to create a page file to be able to specify the permalink that I want. Then I need to specify the post name to alias.
So this is what an alias-page looks like:
---
layout: alias
permalink: two-words
for_post: 2018-04-07-the-post-name
---
Naturally it should not have any content of its own.
Then my “custom” alias
layout
needs to find the post by the name given in for_post in the site.posts
collection, and display it. The post’s name itself seems not to be
exposed, but exposes its file’s relative
path in the repo, which is close enough and I can compute given the post name:
{%- assign post_path = "_posts/" | append: page.for_post | append: ".md" -%}
{{ site.posts | where: "path", post_path | first }}
It turns out that having a Liquid expression like this: `` — is all the code that’s needed to render the post. ✨ Done. 🤓
* * *
PS: Going a little bit meta… While writing this I realized that in this context I was somewhat technically shallow, and felt a little nag in the back of my mind. But thinking a bit more about this, I think it’s because I assumed a different posture: not of a Developer, but rather of a Tech Guys that can get things going to enable other people to do their thing.
I wanted to stay focused on getting things working rather than get into Jekyll’s inner workings and finding The Perfect Solution® — which I think the appropriate attitude in the context. Cool. 😎