Organizing Jekyll Posts

Until last night, I was under the impression you had to store all of your posts as markdown files in a single directory called _posts unless you changed that in your _config.yml file (and even then, my assumption was it was still a single directory.) That said, I still sought out whether there was a way to organize them by at least year within that single folder. I’ve been blogging for 11 years this spring, and while sporadic at times, that is still a lot of posts. When I need to reference a new one, or look for something from the past, having them by year would be nice.

tl;dr yes, you can arbitrarily organize under the _posts folder however you want. All Jekyll looks for are markdown files with FrontMatter.

What I also learned, and isn’t well documented ¹ is that you can create top level folders each with their own _posts sub-folder and Jekyll will read from each one, appending that folder name to the generated url for the post, i.e. a folder foo with _posts with 2016-04-26-post-title would yield a URL of example.com/foo/post-title (varying by your permalink structure). Those top level folders are then treated as categories, allowing for more filtration within your templates and site organization. I can see other ways of using them, especially as I continue to move towards a more Indieweb way of doing things and more tweets originating from this site.

I intend to contribute my discoveries to the official documentation as soon as I can.