Post excerpts in Jekyll

engel@engel.uk.to (Hans Engel) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

There's a fairly simple method for creating WordPress-like post excerpts in Jekyll using a  tag, but unfortunately it requires the installation of a Jekyll plugin, a feature unavailable on a GitHub-hosted Jekyll instance.

What's a bored geek like me to do? Find another way! The exact same excerpt functionality linked to earlier can be replicated by composing a few Liquid filters in the site layout code, like so:

{{ post.content | split: '' | first }}

This little bit of code will output the content of a post until it sees a  tag inside the post content. Just insert the  tag into your posts wherever you'd like them to be cut off.

You can see this snippet in action in my site index template.