Here’s a good starting point when trying to create dynamic links from JSON data with Jekyll, being one of the most popular blog static site generator written in Ruby.
Prerequisites
- Jekyll
Solution
Step 1. Create a JSON file in your _data folder found in the root Jekyll directory. For instance, we had a number of page views list per blog post. It looked something like this:
{
"/top-command-not-found-debian-based-container/": "7",
"/where-to-find-stored-syslog-messages/": "27",
...
}
Step 2. Next, as part of your post.html file located under _layouts add the following code block:
{% assign pageviews = site.data.pageviews %}
{% for pageview in pageviews -%} <li>{{ pageview[0] }} : {{ pageview[1] }}</li> {% endfor %}
Note(s):
- The JSON file was named
pageviews.json. pageview[0]: the blog post title.pageview[1]: the page views. Data was pulled from Google Analytics on a daily basis by running a Python script in a Docker container as a cron task. This could be a separate blog post idea though.- You can even save the code as a Jekyll layout, in case you are going to use in another place, but that’s not the case for me. We were using it only as part of
post.html.
Conclusion
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