Dynamic Copyright Footer With Jekyll

on #self, Jekyll by Stefan Farnik

As you might have noticed, I am using Jekyll for this blog. I keep tinkering with it, instead of writing some blog posts. So I decided maybe I should write some post about … my tinkering with Jekyll.

Sounds good ? Here we go!

The footer originally in the theme, uses a static year for the text. I adapted it in a way, which adopts dynamically.

I didn’t like the idea to have to edit the string each year, so it would reflect the blogs lifetime.
Instead I did a small change, once.

Though, I have to trigger a build by Jekyll, which happens automatically when I put new articles online.

First, we adapt the _config.yaml:

# This text will appear in a `<small>` tag in the footer of every page.
copyright:             >
  © 2018. All rights reserved.
  Open `_config.yml` to edit this text.

to

# This text will appear in a `<small>` tag in the footer of every page.
copyright:             © <!--copyyears--> deepit.at; All rights reserved.

You guessed correctly that we’re going to replace the <!--copyyears--> to the dynamic string. So let’s go to _includes\body\footer.html:

The original line is just a static string:

    <p><small class="copyright">© <!--copyyears--> deepit.at; All rights reserved.
</small></p>

Here is the updated part:


    {% assign year_from = site.posts[-1].date | date: '%Y' %}
    {% assign year_to   = site.time | date: '%Y' %}
    {% if year_from == nil or year_from == year_to %}
      {% assign year_string = year_from %}
    {% else %}
      {% assign from_to_seperator = site.data.strings.from_to_seperator | default: '-' %}
      {% assign year_string = year_from | append: '&nbsp;' | append: from_to_seperator | append: '&nbsp;' | append: year_to %}
    {% endif %}
    <p><small class="copyright">{{ site.copyright | markdownify | replace:'<!--copyyears-->',year_string | replace:'<p>','' | replace:'</p>','' }}</small></p>

What is happening here ?

  • For the starting year, we’re using the date from the first ever post
  • The current year is covered by site.time, which represents the time when Jekyll build the site
  • Next, we’re covering two things:
    • When we don’t have a first post, the year_from string will be empty, so we will be just using the year_to - Jekyll should have build a site, right, so this one won’t be empty at all
    • If both years are the same, we also will be using just one
    • On the other hand, if we have different years, then we will build a string like `2018 - 2019’
  • Finally, we can replace the <!--copyyears--> from site.copyright with our dynamically generated string

Now I don’t need to take care anymore about this litte detail.

All the best,
Stefan

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