Today I learned:

How to make link posts (or external post links) with Jekyll

I’m an avid reader of Marco.org and Daring Fireball. They both have these nifty posts that link directly to external pages. Now that I have two blogs, a podcast, and occasionally have work published elsewhere, I want to keep a record of these things on my cagrimmett.com blog. Link posts are an excellent way to do that.

Jekyll doesn’t have this capability out of the box, but with a little Liquid magic you can make it happen. I followed Christian-Frederik Voigt’s method. This takes advantage of the ability to create items in each post’s YAML front-matter and use them in template files:

First, create a variable called link: in your YAML front-matter for the post you want to link elsewhere. Fill it in with the link you want to post to link to:

--- layout: post title: Snack Time Episode 3 - Negroni Week date: 2016-06-09 feature-img: "/img/snacktime-pattern.png" excerpt: blah blah blah excerpt here link: http://snacktime.fm/episodes/2016/6/9/episode-3-negroni-week ---

Then anywhere in the template files that generates post headlines, you’ll need to write a conditional to check if the new link: variable is present. If it is, you’ll want to write the headline’s link there (post.link) instead of the post.url. I also added an arrow inside another conditional to specify that this is an outgoing link:

{% if post.link %}{{ post.link }}{% else %}{{ post.url }}{% endif %}">{{ post.title }}{% if post.link %} →{% endif %} 

You’ll want to use this anywhere your posts are listed. For me that is in index.html and 404.html.

See this in action on my homepage.

This method works great if you want to have direct links to other places and don’t want a permalink page on your own site that you can reference. I don’t care about that, so I didn’t make this for my site. If you want that, you’ll need to refer to Christian-Frederik Voigt’s method. The short story is that you’ll also need to modify the post and page templates.