Excerpts for Eleventy, by Keith Carangelo

Recently I updated this website’s git repository README to include a summary of my approach to supporting post excerpts.

I define an initial part of a post as the excerpt by adding a separator string between it and the remaining content. Then in my posts list I grab 11ty’s post.page.excerpt and pass that through a custom markdown-parsing filter.

This works pretty well but sometimes it’s a bit inflexible that the excerpt has to be part of the post. Sometimes you might want to say something different, or shorter and snappier in the excerpt.

Keith offers a best of both worlds solution where you can optionally set your excerpt in front matter, and if that exists, use that.

If I want to use different content for the excerpt than the start of the post, I include it in the page’s front matter under excerpt using a YAML HereDoc.

---
excerpt |
  ### Heading
  This is an example excerpt with an ![image](/url/image.png)
---

TIL about the YAML HereDoc, and being able to include multiple lines including markdown in a frontmatter value. Nice! It looks like the syntax Keith uses there is a “literal block style indicator” – more at YAML Multiline.

Thanks, Keith!