Jekyll-paginate-v2 and other musings

[steveng57]

Checklist

• I have read and accepted the contributing guidelines.

Description

Like most of us here, I am a big fan of the Chirpy theme, it rocks on many levels: wow factor and speed to among them. What I am not a fan of is Github Pages limitations, so I decided to break free of those constraints. One thing to note is that Github Pages will still build your site even if you use a plugin not on the approved list. You just need to create your own build pipeline instead of using their canned, prefab one. Once you have done that, you can use any plugin you like, including your own. (you can use my build pipeline to be found on the site referenced below if you like.)

To that end, my site was getting getting long in the post. Too many of them, about 55 and growing. Having a single long list just wasn't working for me anymore, so I decided to embrace jekyll-paginate-v2 and try using it to break things down into more organized layout. After much trial and error (lots of experiments with collection etc.) I decided to keep all the entries as posts (so to not use collections) and use the 'category' filtering capabilities of jekyll-paginate-v2.

It sounded simple at first but this let me down the path of needing to create my own plugin to get jekyll-paginate-v2 to do its own thing but automated against the categories already in my posts. Then of course I had to mod the sidebar.html to have it show the categories in a hierarchical view, then of course post-paginator.html needed to be updated along with the breadcrumbs found in topbar.html.

Copilot (It likes to be called Nova) was used extensively in this process, and the end result can be found here: https://github.com/steveng57/steveng57.github.io and the published site can be found at www.stevengoulet.com

Feel free to use it as you like, maybe we can form the foundation for Chirpy V9 together. Kudos to lakshyaelite for the original post on jekyll-paginate-v2 from which I learned much.