Creating categories on Jekyll driven site

Question

I\'m having a hard time understanding how to generate archive pages for each category I use on my blog. I\'d like the user to be able to click on a category and then be taken to

Answer 1

Note: I'm linking examples here that are using tags (because the examples already existed, with tags), but they work the same for categories.

---

If you don't want to use a plugin, for example if you want your site to work on GitHub Pages, you have only two options:

1. Create a single page which contains all categories, alphabetically sorted

2. Indeed create a separate HTML file for each category manually, but put as much as possible into a layout file, so creating a new category page isn't much work:

   /_layouts/tagpage.html:

   ---
   layout: default
   ---
   
   {{ page.tag }}
   
   
   {% for post in site.tags[page.tag] %}
     
   
       {{ post.date | date: "%B %d, %Y" }}: {{ post.title }}
     
   {% endfor %}
   
   

   With this layout file, you need only two lines of YAML front-matter to add a new tag page:
   (in this case for the jekyll tag)

   /tags/jekyll/index.html:

   ---
   layout: tagpage
   tag: jekyll
   ---
   

   So the actual effort to create a new tag page is minimal - the only thing is that you need to remember to do it when you're using a new tag for the first time.