This site is meant to be a collection of my readings - book chapters, web articles, academic papers, etc. As such, convenient tagging is crucial. While Jekyll offers a minimalistic and fast static-site generation and convenient hosting on github-pages, it has minimal tagging support.

Requirements:

• Minimal effort initiating a new tag.
• Automatic generation of a single tag page that lists posts associated with all available tags.
• Automatic generation of separate pages associated with different tags.

There have been a few posts online about how to do this: Charlie Park, Christian Specht. The latter comes very close to what I needed, upon which I based my implementation.

Implementation:

The general approach is, whenever a new tag is created (e.g. entered into the “tags” field of a post’s YAML front-matter), we need to create a tags/my_new_tag.html file with the following content:

---
layout: tagpage
tag: my_new_tag
---

This means we need to create the layout _layouts/tagpage.html.

At this point, Jekyll will have generated a separate page for our newly created tag at /tags/my_new_tag.html.

To generate the single page that lists posts associated with all tags, we create alltags.html. Note the tags will be displayed in alphabetical order.

I also want to show, for each individual post, its asssociated tags. This is done by including _includes/tag_line.html in _layouts/post.html.