Jekyll - How To Display A Count Of Posts Per Tag Or Category

Jekyll - How To Display A Count Of Posts Per Tag Or Category

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3 min read

My Changelog website is where I keep track of all my creative work online. It contains links to every article, newsletter edition, digital product, and project I create.

I built it in Jekyll, my static site generator of choice.

One of the first hurdles I had to navigate when building the site was how to display a stats page. This would summarize all my content under a few different parameters. I wanted to display counts of posts per categories as well as tags.

Here's how I accomplished setting up a display of post counts per category and tag.


Site Structure

Let's start with a summary of how things are set up on the Changelog site.

I have the following tags:

  • Coding
  • Creation
  • Design
  • Milestone
  • Productivity

These serve as the main buckets or topics I talk about most often. My niche if you will.

Milestone is slightly different. It denotes various markers I want to celebrate like hitting 500 Twitter followers or growing my Medium following.

Then I have categories:

  • Article
  • Book Notes
  • Digital Product
  • Github Repo
  • Newsletter
  • Website

These denote the type of content I've created.

Here's a screenshot of my stats page to show you the end result:

Stats Page

As you can see, each component shows the tag/category name and a count of the posts under that tag/category.

Each component also has a link to the relevant tag/category page to help with navigation.

I highly recommend you check out the live version of the site for more context: Changelog Stats


Display Post Count By Tag

This couldn't be simpler. All you need to add is the following code:

{{ site.tags.Creation | size }}

Just replace "Creation" with the name of your tag. The only thing that could potentially trip you up here is misspelling the tag name so be sure to double-check that.


Display Post Count By Category

Post count by category is equally as easy to implement. Just use the following code:

{{ site.categories.Article | size }}

Again, be sure to double-check spelling here as this is what usually trips me up.


Display Post Count Of All Posts

If you want a count of all posts on your website, here's the code:

{{ site.posts | size }}}

Super simple ๐Ÿ‘


Count All Posts Minus A Specific Tag

Here's a fun one that will hopefully be helpful to you.

On my homepage, there is a picture of me and underneath it is a level counter. I set this up to try and gamify my content creation. The higher the level, the more content I've created.

Level Count

To accomplish this, I needed to count all posts except for milestone type posts (as these aren't pieces of content I've created, they're just events).

Here's the pseudo-code: my current level = all posts - milestone posts. Then divide by 10 (this step is optional for you)

Here's the code I used to make that happen:

 {% assign count_posts = site.posts | size %}

 {% assign milestone_posts = site.tags.Milestone | size %}

 {% assign total_posts = count_posts | minus: milestone_posts %}

 <span class="font-bold pl-2">Level {{ total_posts | divided_by: 10 }}</span>

Pretty cool right?

Just replace the "Milestone" tag with your own tag.

In your case, you may not need "divided_by: 10" as this was something I added in to determine the level to display.


I hope you found this article helpful. I'm always finding new tips and techniques for building Jekyll websites and I really enjoy being able to share them with you!

If you enjoyed this, please consider sharing it with someone else who might find it useful ๐Ÿค—

This article was originally published over on my website: Jekyll - How To Display A Count Of Posts Per Tag Or Category

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