If you want to use Jekyll but don’t want to settle with a list of links to your blog posts, I just open sourced the parts that drives this blog’s infinite scroll. By compiling a JSON file with meta data about all blog posts, we can use that to load more posts dynamimcally as you scroll.

If you’d like to add this feature to your Jekyll site, head over to GitHub and grab the source, and let’s get started.

Adding the files

Add the js folder and all-posts.json to the root of your Jekyll site. If you’re not already using jQuery, open _layouts/default.html and include it:

<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.10.2/jquery.min.js"></script>

In _layouts/default.html, include infinite-jekyll.js after jQuery:

<script src="/js/infinite-jekyll.js"></script>

Render posts, not links

How fun is it to only see links? Open up index.html. Find this line:

<li><span>{{ post.date | date_to_string }}</span> &raquo; <a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a></li>

Remove everything within the li. Open up _layouts/post.html and copy the markup for single posts. Paste it within the li, and replace every instance of page. with post.. This is how it should look using the default markup:

<li>
	<h2>{{ post.title }}</h2>
	<p class="meta">{{ post.date | date_to_string }}</p>
	
	<div class="post">
	{{ post.content }}
	</div>
</li>

Limit the number of posts

Per default, Jekyll will render all posts in your entire archive. For lazy loading to make sense, we need to set a limit. Open up index.html and find this line:

{% for post in site.posts %}

Change it to:

{% for post in site.posts limit: 10 %}

You can change 10 to whatever number you like. The same number will be used for lazy loading new posts, so 10 will render 10 static post, and then fetch another 10 posts every time you get near the bottom of the page.

Add the spinner

You should see your 10 latest posts on the front page, but no infinite scroll yet. Infinite Jekyll will only try to lazy load posts if there’s a spinner present. At the very end of index.html, add the spinner:

<div class="infinite-spinner"></div>

spinner.css contains a simple CSS spinner that works in most modern browsers. Open up css/main.css, and at the bottom, paste everything from spinner.css.

And that should be it. If you’re having any issues, ping me on twitter, or create an issue in the repo. Happy scrolling!