Dealing with Repetitive Links on a Jekyll blog

May 26, 2013

Dealing with Repetitive Links on a Jekyll blog → via @_patrickwelker

My blogging engine is the static site generator Jekyll and I’ve come to love it. In my attempt of being able to blog on my iPad at some point in time, the first plugin I set up was Olov Lassus smart Markdown references plugin.

To shed some light on why this is a great plugin for mobile bloggers here’s a one sentence explanation about what it does:

You can gather your markdown reference links in one file and refer to them up anywhere inside your Jekyll installation, be it posts or pages.

The setup is as simple as it can get, you put the plugin in your plugins directory, add a file named _references.md in your root directory and you’re done.

Here’s an excerpt of my _references.md:

[TUAW]: http://tuaw.com
[MacStories]: http://macstories.net
[Macdrifter]: http://macdrifter.com
[Gabe Weatherhead]: https://twitter.com/macdrifter
[Ben Brooks]: https://twitter.com/BenjaminBrooks
[Sven Fechner]: https://twitter.com/simplicitybliss
[Brett Terpstra]: https://twitter.com/ttscoff
[Ethan Schoonover]: http://twitter.com/ethanschoonover
[Federico Viticci]: http://twitter.com/viticci
[Michael Schechter]: http://twitter.com/mschechter
[Huffduffer]: http://huffduffer.com/
[ADN]: http://app.net/
[Glassboard]: http://glassboard.com/
[Keyboard Maestro]: http://keyboardmaestro.com
[Hazel]: http://www.noodlesoft.com/hazel.php
[TaskPaper]: http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/taskpaper

So everytime I want to link to one of Gabe’s post I could write something like "This is a link to [Gabe's Twitter account][Gabe Weatherhead], follow him!" and I don’t have to think twice about what his Twitter handle is.

It’s a great plugin and it looks tremendously useful. The only downside is that your Markdown documents won’t be useful outside of Jekyll since the links are broken. That is why I spend some significant time today to replace all references with real links. I could have kept the plugin as a backup solution, but I figured once I got a working iPad workflow I can always install it again.

Why I write about something I just abandoned? Well, like I said it’s a super nifty plugin and I think some of you Jekyll bloggers might like it. In conjunction with TextExpander for iPhone it certainly has some serious nerd potential.

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