Count posts in current year?

Help
1

Hi folks,

I’m looking to add an includes into my posts where it counts the amount of published posts in the current year and outputs it to a simple string like:

“This is post number X that I have published so far this year.”

I assume I can use something like

{{ site.posts | size }}

But I don’t know how to filter that to only count posts in the current year.

Thanks in advance!

2

Have a look at getting the date on a post and date for today.
Then compare the year.

Hint: the date method can get you just the year.
Second hint: You don’t actually need to use size. If you use where_expr or for/if to filter to posts in the current year, then if there are zero posts to show them none will be shown

I don’t want to give a full answer, so you can go through the research process.

Searches for Jekyll syntax on Jekyll docs or a look.

If you still don’t come right, post the code that you found.

3

Are you sure you want to filter current year only? Your blog page will go from 100 posts to 0 posts on 1 Jan.

Why not filter to the last 3 or 10 posts? Already a common pattern on Jekyll themes.

Or group posts by year. There was a recent forum discussion covering this. Showing the year as a heading before the post preview, but skipping the heading if the year is the same as the next item

ie

## 2021

- post title
- post title

## 2020

- post title

## 2019

...

Also don’t know if a reader cares about the distinction of grouping posts into years. I prefer to look at a stream of all posts and see the date for a given post for context. Having a category like JavaScript as a heading or as a page of only those posts is more useful than year.

4

Thanks for the replies. Maybe I wasn’t clear in my original post. I’m not trying to have this liquid filter spit out links to post, I simply want a count of posts for the current year.

So I will have a sentence at the end of the post that says “This post number X that I have published this year.”

Where “X” is the output from the count filter.

5

I’ve decided to change my approach (thanks for the cheat sheet @MichaelCurrin it has been really helpful). What I want to do works, but it now spits out a lot of warnings at build - which I want to avoid, obviously.

So I have 100days21.html which I’m using in an includes statement. That file has the following contents:

<p class="hundred-days">This is post number <span class="hundred-days-number">{{ page.100days21 }}</span> in my 2021 <a target="blank" href="https://100daystooffload.com">100 Days To Offload</a> challenge.</p>

I also have 100days21 in my front matter for the posts I want to include this file on. So, in my posts layout I’ve added the following:

{% if page.100days21 %}
  {% include 100days21.html %}
{% endif %}

This correctly parses my front matter and only includes the 100days21.html file on the post with the relevant front matter. However, it spits out a tonne of warnings like this on build:

Liquid Warning: Liquid syntax error (line 10): Expected id but found number in "page.100days21" in C:/Users/Kev/GitHub/kevq.uk/_layouts/post.html

I’m sure there’s a more elegant solution to this that will prevent these warnings, I just don’t know what it is. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

6

Make sure your frontmatter variable and includes file don’t start with numbers.

Use _100 instead of 100.

In programming usually this is invalid variable

100days = "abc"
7

Sorry I missed the part about count.

You can use filters.

Convert array of hashes to array of strings.

Then convert to array of years. Then filter to current year.

{% current_year = ... %}
{% assign post_years = site.posts | map: "date"
  | date: "%Y" %}
{% assign post_years_this_year = post_years | where: current_year %}
{{ post_years_this_year.size }}

Use today or now or something and date filter to get current year set. Cheatsheets will help

8

Make sure your frontmatter variable and includes file don’t start with numbers.

That worked perfectly - thank you so much. And thank you for not just giving me the answer, but rather the resources to learn about it myself so I could get most of the way there on my own.

1 Like
9

Awesome to hear.

You’re welcome.