Continuing with my Jekyll series, here’s a list of the plugins and other hacks I use to make everything on this site run as smooth as possible.

Pagination

For pagination, I just followed the guidelines from the official wiki and did some minor changes in the markup. Although it’s strictly not a plugin, I had to make a small configuration in Jekyll’s pagination.rb file since I wanted to generate my pagination pages in to a different folder than the default one. I copied the pagination.rb from Jekyll’s library directory and placed it in the _plugins folder and changed the following line from this:

newpage.dir = File.join(page.dir, "page#{num_page}")

To this:

newpage.dir = File.join(page.dir, "page/#{num_page}")

To my suprise, it actually worked! Like I said earlier, I guess it doesn’t really count as a plugin, but I thought it would be good to mention it so that someone else can use the same approach if they want to.

Tags

To get tags to work on this site I used an excellent guide/plugin from Charlie Parker. I also changed the default folder to a different one by adding and changing tag_dir in my _config.yml file (ie: tag_dir: /blog/tag/ instead of just tag_dir: /tag/).

RSS feed

I followed and used the guidelines from Snaptortoise’s RSS Feeds Templates. However, instead of using layout: rss-feed in my feed.xml file I use layout: nil. Same thing, different names.

Sitemap

I use Mike Levin’s sitemap.xml Generator to generate a simple sitemap. It’s maybe not the the most required function ever, but I like to have it.

Images

For an easy image implementation I used Scott Parker’s plugin ImageBlock. It makes it easier to add images to the blog post by using a liquid tag. Simple and effective. However, it’s probably not suitable if you’re going to use a lot of images since it just fetches them from one folder called images (or in my case, /assets/images).

Youtube

I stumbled upon this gist/plugin by Portway Point and I decided to test it even though I probably won’t use it that much. It works perfectly and like the above plugin you use it by adding a simple liquid tag.