Pagination in jekyll

2 minute read Published: 2010-08-30

I migrated my personal site to jekyll today, as I said before; for my blog, I wanted something simple, codinghorror, simple and yet a little simpler than that: I don't like the clutter of sidebars and footers, but there had to be a way for people to navigate amongst my entries (I also don't assume that people have the best internet connection ever to load all my posts in one page).

So, I set up to enable pagination. At first, I was worried that almost none of the listed sites used it, but then I stumbled with this gist and it was indeed easy. You see, by adding paginate: true to your _config.yml jekyll will load a new variable in your templates: paginator, with it, you can get the current, previous and next page numbers (among other things). And when building your site, the engine will group your posts in folders corresponding to their page, so the posts for page 2 would be at /page2 etc.

This jekyll thing is really great, the liquid template language feels like django and, if you've hacked some, is really easy to get used to (I've been using it for a couple of hours and I think I don't feel lost anymore). I'd love to see haml templating, though.