Implementing Tags/Categories on Jekyll using Liquid !

I have recently been working on my blog on using Jekyll on Github Pages and the experience has been wonderful. It a lot easier than wordpress where I have to login and do all kinds of formatting to churn out a decent looking post. Here its just Markdown and some pre configurations and I just need to update a github repo at the end of it.

Interestingly, Jekyll supports Liquid a templating engine built on ruby that is developed by e commerce giant Shopify. Using Liquid we can add some basic logic ( and maybe advance too) to the blog like categorization and tagging. Tagging is not available out of the box with Jekyll but can be implemented easily using Liquid .

It essentially involves two steps:

1. Editing YML front matter (The thing between the 3 dashes)
2. Creating a Category page to automatically accumulate all the tags you added

After this the changes will be reflected on compilation. And Voila! You would have added tags to your blog!

Lets get started.

Add a Tags variable to the frontmatter block and list the tags as shown the following example:

---
layout: post
title: Tagging Jekyll
tags:
- Jekyll
- Blogging
- web
---

Next, create a page in the root or in whatever way you have configured Jekyll to pick new page and create a page say Categories etc. Lets name it Categories.md

Use the following snippet to display tags.

Now

jekyll build jekyll serve

and see the changes in the blog on http://localhost:4000. If you face any issues be sure to comment here .

Cheers!

Rohit