As you might have notices I use Jekyll for this blog hosted on GitHub. I might do a post later on how I use it and how I set it up. For now, all you need to know is that Jekyll turns .md(markdown) file in to a blog. This happens using GitHub actions and builds my blog from source when I commit to main. Jekyll support some dynamic code to generate content and in this blog I will show you how I used that to generate an overview of all blog posted in a certain category.

Why

As part of my ongoing study’s I decided to give EX280 (Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Administration) a try. I wrapped up EX200 earlier to get familiar with the way RedHat does Remote testing and to get a feel for the style of question’s that are asked. I passed EX200 on the first try but wasn’t lucky on EX280 (getting 150 of 300 points on the first try, 210 are needed to pass). It was then that I thought back on something I red recently about learning:

“Writing is thinking” (Ahrens2017)¹

So I decided that I would do some write ups on the core concepts that you need to know for EX280. I also thought It might warrant a special page on my blog to find it easily.

How

I started by creating a new category in Jekyll. This is simply done by using setting a new category in the front matter of a markdown file:

As an example, this is the front matter of this post:

title: "Creating my EX280 page on Jekyll"
toc: true
mermaid: true
categories: [Jekyll]
tags: [EX280, Study]

Creating a tab

Next up I created a tab in my Jekyll locals file, you can see that over here. The locals file for this blog is located at _data/locales.

....
# The tabs of sidebar
tabs:
  # format: <filename_without_extension>: <value>
  home: Home
  categories: Categories
  tags: Tags
  archives: Archives
  about: About
....

Creating the page

Next up I created a page in _tabs with some content explaining what the page was about. It’s the page you are now viewing and it’s located at _tabs

Dynamically filling the page

Last up was creating the overview of my EX280 posts on this new page. I did this using and modifying the following code:

<div id="page-category">
  <h1 class="pl-lg-2">
    <i class="far fa-folder-open fa-fw text-muted"></i>
      All EX280 Related post's
    <span class="lead text-muted pl-2">{{ site.categories["EX280"] | size }}</span>
  </h1>

  <ul class="post-content pl-0">
    {% assign post_df = site.data.locales[lang].date_format.post.long %}

    {% for post in site.categories["EX280"] %}
    <li class="d-flex justify-content-between pl-md-3 pr-md-3">
      <a href="{{ post.url | relative_url }}">{{ post.title }}</a>
      <span class="dash flex-grow-1"></span>
      <span class="text-muted small">{{ post.date | date: post_df }}</span>
    </li>
    {% endfor %}
  </ul>
</div>

The most important this is the selector of the category: site.categories["EX280"]. if you wanted to simply list a blog of you custom category (let’s call the example category foo) you could use:

  {% for post in site.categories["foo"] %}
  <li">
    <a href="{{ post.url | relative_url }}">{{ post.title }}</a>
  </li>
  {% endfor %}

Wrapping up

So that’s it. At the time of writing I have the first two EX280 post’s up but I have planed a few more. Check out the page at https://blog.benstein.nl/ex280/

Update: It paid of. I passed the exam on my second try with 262/300 points.