One of the things I missed in Jekyll when I switched from Wordpress was a frictionless way of posting videos to my website1. My idea was to add the video’s ID to the YAML front matter of the post and have Jekyll insert the embed code only if a video ID is given. Thanks to Jekyll’s Liquid templating capabilities, this was not difficult to implement.

I have also added a new command to my Jekyll workflow for Alfred which uses an AppleScript to grab the title and URL of a Youtube or Vimeo page in Safari, extracts the video ID and creates a new draft with the front matter filled in. The workflow command reduces the time it takes to make a video post to about 5 seconds plus the time you need to write your comment. I will update the workflow repository soon.

You can find the instructions as well as two example files in this Github Repository.

  1. True, there is no video on this website. But I am a teacher and run a website for my students on which I post interesting links, images, quotes and, yes, videos. At the end of the school year, I deleted my Wordpress site and am now preparing its Jekyll successor. ↩︎