Mention other pages linking to current page

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1

Hi
I’ve a question how to make a thing similar as in Your first seed — My digital garden in the sidebar with title Notes mentioning this note.

Can you help me to reproduce this feature? Please :pray:

Here’s what I tried:
I am structuring the project same in the theme project and added plugin in _plugins folder. Here’s the plugin script which I believe is responsible for doing this no hope it work but it’s not working and not doing anything at. I tried tweaking this like in plugin script changing all_docs only to all_notes and changing all_notes. I found even in layout script site.collections[’“notes”].docs show nothing so I did all_notes = site.notes.

I’ve never worked with ruby so please help me how to make this thing in any way or at help me dubug Digital Garden theme script working somehow.

2

Note that non official gems installed or any ruby plugins added to _plugins dir will not work on GH Pages in the standard flow. Are you using GH Pages?

You can still test a plugin locally easily.

Run a jekyll build --verbose to see where your plugin is getting loaded, or not.
Use --trace if you get an error and need more info

3

Did you mean to link to this page?

notes_graph.html

It sounds like you meant to link to a ruby script

Or when you say plugin do you mean JavaScript code?

4

[OFF-TOPIC] : On the other hand, departing from the one you mention, Brennan Brown went further with his Digital Garden… .
For inspiration ?

5

I mean to say a ruby plugin. Please check _plugins folder in the Digital Garden theme.
I already tried your mentioned solutions. I even tried Jekyll.logger.info “Hello” but not worked.

6

Follow the plugins generator tutorial in the docs.

Use puts 'hello' inside a generate method.

You can run your plugin through Jekyll serve or build.

You can run it directly with ruby. This might not work fully because it needs Jekyll in the context but it can tell you of Ruby syntax errors.

bundle exec ruby _plugins/testing.rb

If you have problems getting a Hello World generator to work, then open up a new topic discussion around that and share your repo and the command you use to run Jekyll.

Any problem around the specific digital garden plugin usage is best discussed from point of a generic working plugin and can continue here.

7

mm interesting

looks like the magic happens here:

  {% if page.backlinks.size > 0 %}
  <div style="display: grid; grid-gap: 1em; grid-template-columns: repeat(1fr);">
  {% for backlink in page.backlinks %}
    <div class="backlink-box">
    <a class="internal-link" href="{{ backlink.url }}">{{ backlink.title }}</a><br>
    <div style="font-size: 0.9em">{{ backlink.excerpt | strip_html | truncatewords: 20 }}</div>
    </div>
  {% endfor %}
  </div>
  {% else %}

  <div style="font-size: 0.9em">
    <p>
      There are no notes linking to this note.
    </p>
  </div>
  {% endif %}

using a local _plugin

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/maximevaillancourt/digital-garden-jekyll-template/73ba1d475a32ac08f9c0a5cc881741eea4ea3fb6/_plugins/bidirectional_links_generator.rb

I’d quite like to use this too :slight_smile:

1 Like
8

well that was surprisingly easy !!!

in _layout/default.html

{% if page.backlinks.size > 0 %}
    <div class="backlink-box p-3 m-5 border shadow-sm d-print-none">
        <ul>
        {% for backlink in page.backlinks %}
            <li><a href="{{ site.url }}{{ backlink.url }}">{{ backlink.title }}</a></li>
        {% endfor %}
        </ul>
    </div>
{% endif %}

in my css:

.backlink-box {
    background-color: #f0f3ff;
}
.backlink-box:before {
    content: "What links here";
    font-style: italic;
}
.backlink-box li {
    line-height: 1em;
}

and finally, the magic plugin (which was surprisingly easy)

A special note here: I have a collection called “docs”
You will need to alter
all_notes = site.collections['docs'].docs
to suit your own needs (you might have a collection called “fruit”)
all_notes = site.collections['fruit'].docs

in _plugins/backlinks_generator.rb

class BackLinksGenerator < Jekyll::Generator
  def generate(site)

    all_notes = site.collections['docs'].docs
    all_pages = site.pages
    all_docs = all_notes + all_pages

    # Identify backlinks and add them to each doc
    all_notes.each do |current_note|
      notes_linking_to_current_note = all_notes.filter do |e|
        e.content.include?(current_note.url)
      end
      current_note.data['backlinks'] = notes_linking_to_current_note
    end

  end

end

screenshot:

what_links_here
what_links_here749×324 8.53 KB

1 Like
9

I noticed a typo in my above code yesterday. The plugin only creates links for “collections”

if you want backlinks for pages and posts as well then:

class BackLinksGenerator < Jekyll::Generator
  def generate(site)

    all_notes = site.collections['docs'].docs
    all_posts = site.posts.docs
    all_pages = site.pages

    all_docs = all_notes + all_posts + all_pages 

    # Identify backlinks and add them to each doc
    all_docs.each do |current_note|
      notes_linking_to_current_note = all_docs.filter do |e|
        e.content.include?(current_note.url)
      end
      current_note.data['backlinks'] = notes_linking_to_current_note
    end

  end

end

but … somehow EVERYTHING is linked to my home page “/” so I put an exclusion into my layout

{% assign home = site.html_pages | where: 'url', '/' | first %}
 {% if page.url != home.url %}
    {% if page.backlinks.size > 0 %}
      <div class="backlink-box">
        <ul>
        {% for backlink in page.backlinks %}
          <li><a href="{{ site.url }}{{ backlink.url }}">{{ backlink.title }}</a></li>
        {% endfor %}
        </ul>
      </div>
    {% endif %}
{% endif %}
1 Like