I can’t be bothered to install jekyll on my local machine, so plugins for things like tags don’t work for me. Based on this tutorial by minddust, I was able to get tags to semi-automatically fill out tag pages. You still have to make a page for each tag, but at least it is automatically populated with posts now.
I created the file _includes/gen_tags_content.html.
{% if post.tags.size > 0 %}
{% capture tags_content %}Posted with {% if post.tags.size == 1 %}<i class="fa fa-tag"></i>{% else %}<i class="fa fa-tags"></i>{% endif %}: {% endcapture %}
{% for post_tag in post.tags %}
{% for data_tag in site.data.tags %}
{% if data_tag.slug == post_tag %}
{% assign tag = data_tag %}
{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
{% if tag %}
{% capture tags_content_temp %}{{ tags_content }}<a href="/tags/{{ tag.slug }}/">{{ tag.name }}</a>{% if forloop.last == false %}, {% endif %}{% endcapture %}
{% assign tags_content = tags_content_temp %}
{% assign tag = false %}
{% else %}
{% capture tags_content_temp %}{{ tags_content }}<a href="/tags/{{ post_tag }}/">{{ post_tag }}</a>{% if forloop.last == false %}, {% endif %}{% endcapture %}
{% assign tags_content = tags_content_temp %}
{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
{% else %}
{% assign tags_content = '' %}
{% endif %}
This is pretty similar to minddust’s script, but also allows for you to use tags that are not in _data/tags.yml (see below). This file gets included anywhere you want to generate the list of tags for a post, but that is all it does. Then, in your _layouts/post.html you need to add the following lines.
{% assign post = page %}
{% include gen_tags_content.html %}
...
{{ tags_content}}
%{ endraw %}
The first two lines should go near the top of the file, while the last line goes where you want the tags to print out.
I found the first line to be necessary because the script in _include/gen_tags_content.html references post, but the data is actually in page.
On your post entry, you can now add tags in the header.
---
layout: post
title: How To Use Tags And Categories On GitHub Pages Without Plugins
category: programming
tags: [github, github-pages, jekyll]
---
At this point, tags are printing out, but the links dont work. For every tag you want to have the link work, you need to do the following steps:
Enable relative permalinks in your _config.yml by adding the following line. This is needed to make your pages end up in a url that corresponds to the directories they are in.
relative_permalinks: true
Next we need to make a layout template for our tag lists. Put the following in a file at _layouts/blog_by_tag.html
{% raw %}
---
layout: default
---
<h1>Articles related to {{ page.tag }}</h1>
<div>
{% if site.tags[page.tag] %}
{% for post in site.tags[page.tag] %}
<a href="{{ post.url }}/">{{ post.title }}</a>
{% endfor %}
{% else %}
<p>There are no posts for this tag.</p>
{% endif %}
</div>
Finally, for each tag you want a page for (in other words, a working link), create a page at /tags/mytagname.md that looks like this.
---
layout: blog_by_tag
tag: mytagname
permalink: mytagname/
---
This will render a page at the corresponding url that uses the blog_by_tag layout seeded to create a list using the supplied tag.
Now, if you want to have pretty tags, you need to create a _data/tags.yml. This will allow you to have things like spaces in tag names. Add entries to it like so
- slug: github-pages
name: GitHub Pages