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Why Tag Clouds Still Matter While tag clouds might seem like a relic of early blogging days, they’re still valuable for navigating content, improving internal linking, and helping search engines crawl related topics on your blog. In Jekyll, we can build a tag cloud using only Liquid templating, without any plugins or scripts, making it perfect for GitHub Pages or other static environments. What We’ll Build This guide walks you through creating a responsive tag cloud that: Displays all tags used across your blog Counts how often each tag appears Adjusts font size based on tag frequency Links to tag-based archives (e.g., /tag/seo ) Step 1: Enable Tag Indexing in Posts Each post must define a tags array in the front matter: --- layout: post title: "Improve Your Blog SEO" tags: [seo, jekyll, optimization] --- Step 2: Create a Tag Archive Layout Create a new layout file tag.html in your _layouts folder to handle tag-specific pages: {% raw %} --- ...

Why Featured Images Matter Featured images are visual anchors for blog posts. They catch attention, improve click-through rates, and enhance the aesthetic of post listings. For Jekyll blogs, especially those deployed on GitHub Pages, adding featured image support can be done with just a few front matter fields and template updates—no plugins needed. Step 1: Add a Featured Image Field to Front Matter Open any post and define a new property, such as image , in the front matter. Example: --- layout: post title: "How to Improve Readability" image: /assets/images/readability-cover.jpg --- This path should point to an image you've uploaded to your assets directory (or wherever you keep static files). Step 2: Display the Image in the Post Template Edit your _layouts/post.html file (or whatever layout your blog uses) and insert the following Liquid code where you want the image to appear: {% raw %} {% if page.image %} <img src="{{ page.image }}" a...

Why Tag Clouds Still Matter While tag clouds might seem like a relic of early blogging days, they’re still valuable for navigating content, improving internal linking, and helping search engines crawl related topics on your blog. In Jekyll, we can build a tag cloud using only Liquid templating, without any plugins or scripts, making it perfect for GitHub Pages or other static environments. What We’ll Build This guide walks you through creating a responsive tag cloud that: Displays all tags used across your blog Counts how often each tag appears Adjusts font size based on tag frequency Links to tag-based archives (e.g., /tag/seo ) Step 1: Enable Tag Indexing in Posts Each post must define a tags array in the front matter: --- layout: post title: "Improve Your Blog SEO" tags: [seo, jekyll, optimization] --- Step 2: Create a Tag Archive Layout Create a new layout file tag.html in your _layouts folder to handle tag-specific pages: {% raw %} --- ...

Why Multilingual Support Matters for Static Blogs Expanding your blog’s reach to non-English speakers or supporting multiple languages can greatly improve accessibility and user experience. However, traditional methods often rely on Ruby plugins or dynamic backends, which are not compatible with GitHub Pages or fully static deployments. This guide explains how to build multilingual Jekyll sites without plugins or JavaScript, using only native features. Approach Overview We’ll use a folder-based approach where each language gets its own root-level directory. For example: /_index.html /en/index.html /fr/index.html /id/index.html _layouts/ /_includes/ /_posts/en/ /_posts/fr/ This method is fully static and works flawlessly on GitHub Pages. It allows full control over routing, SEO metadata, and localized content presentation. Step-by-Step Setup Step 1: Define Your Languages Start by deciding which languages you want to support. For example: English (en), French (fr), and In...

Why a No-JavaScript Search Makes Sense Not every Jekyll site needs a JavaScript-heavy search engine. Many minimalist blogs and documentation sites prefer clean, fast-loading pages with no extra dependencies. A no-JavaScript search also improves accessibility, works on older browsers, and maintains full compatibility with GitHub Pages. The Concept Behind a Static Search Since Jekyll is a static site generator, all content is available at build time. This means we can generate a static HTML search index during the build, and use basic HTML form actions and anchor links to simulate search functionality. The key lies in offering filtered navigation rather than true text indexing. Approach: Category-Based Static Search The simplest and most SEO-friendly method is to mimic search through categories, tags, or titles using pre-built pages and anchor targets. Here's how you can implement this in your Jekyll site. Step 1: Create a Search Form Start by adding a basic HTML form tha...

Why Category Pagination is Important When your blog starts to grow, category pages can become long and overwhelming. Pagination helps break these pages into manageable parts, improving both user experience and crawlability. Unfortunately, Jekyll does not support pagination out of the box on custom category pages unless you use plugins — which are not supported on GitHub Pages. So, we’ll explore a clean, plugin-free method. The Challenge with Native Pagination Jekyll’s built-in paginator only works on the main index page. It doesn't natively allow you to paginate custom collections or category archives. To overcome this, we need to work with some Liquid logic and page templates. Step 1: Create a Category Page Template First, you’ll need a category layout (e.g., category.html ) that can receive a category name via front matter. --- layout: default title: Category permalink: /category/:name/ --- Add the following to load all posts with a specific category: {% raw %} {...