Github Pages, Markdown and Jekyll tips and tricks

This page will include some tricks I have learned with Jekyll, Markdown and Github Pages.

Opening a link in a new Page

A link is presented in markdown as [User Friendly Text](http://domain.com/someLink). This will open link in the same page/window/tab. To open a link in a new tab we need to add {:target="_blank"} right after the href syntax or alternatively use the html <a> tag. I personally prefer the former 😄.

Categories and tags

Github Pages doesn’t support neither categories or tags. However, it is easy to add any or both. It is as simple as adding categories and/or tags to the front matter. It may take one item categories: some-category or an array of categories categories: [category-1, category-2].

Here I have created a page for each category, manually. Then I iterated over each post in the given category for post in site.categories[category]. I listed those posts in the same format as the main page. Alternatively, you can create a dedicated page where you can list all categories and each of their posts. Check links 2 and 3 in the resources section.

---

Resources

1. stackoverflow: Can I create links with ‘target=“_blank”’ in Markdown?
2. 3 Simple steps to setup Jekyll Categories and Tags
3. Use Tags and Categories in your Jekyll based Github Pages without plugins