This blog is built with Octopress, itself built on top of Jekyll, a static site generator.

As I was blogging through Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, I thought it would be neat to have a list of all the posts in that series, accessible from the sidebar.

Essentially, my goal was to be able to add an attribute series to a post, to add it to a named group of posts, and to generate a list of all posts in the same group to add to the sidebar.

The first part is easy. In Jekyll, the YAML Front Matter is extensible. So I just added

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series: "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks"

to the relevant posts.

The second one is a bit trickier. Jekyll exposes the post data not directly, but through a hash that is built for each post. This hash is built by two methods, render and to_liquid.

My plugin replaces render to insert the series_posts, an array of all the posts with the same series attribute.

But to display the list of posts, I need a short title, so also added support for that. A short title is computed in the overridden to_liquid method. The computation is the following:

• if there is a short_title attribute in the YAML Front Matter, use it
• otherwise, if the name of the series is a prefix of the post title, remove it from the title and use the rest
• otherwise use the post title.

To display the series posts in the sidebar, I’m using this code:

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{% if page and page.series %}
<section>
  <h1>{{page.series}} Series</h1>
  {% assign series_posts = site.series_posts %}
      <ul>
      {% for p in series_posts %}
          <li class="post"><a href="{{ root_url }}{{ p.url }}">{{ p.short_title }}</a></li>
      {% endfor %}
      </ul>
</section>
{% endif %}

The code can be found here.