I wanted to have a URL which I can give to someone and it would always take them to the latest post published on my blog. I ended up using (https://varunbarad.com/blog/latest)[vb-blog-latest](https://varunbarad.com/blog/latest) as the URL.
Since my website is statically generated and hosted, it wasn’t an option for me to specify a server-side 30x redirect for that particular URL to my latest post.
So what I ended up doing is generate a page on each build which would redirect user to the latest post using JS. To get the information about latest post, I made use of Jekyll’s Liquid templating syntax (not sure what else to call it).
So the <body> tag of that page ended up looking like this:
<body>
{%- assign latest_post = site.posts[0] -%}
<p>Redirecting you to {{ latest_post.title }}</p>
<script>
window.location.href = "{{ latest_post.url }}";
</script>
</body>
Here I get the details of latest post by taking the first post in the list site.posts. AFAIK site.posts is sorted in descending order by publishing date, so this approach fetches me the last published post.
Then it is a simple matter of setting the window.location.href to the final url of the latest post.
The final task remaining was to make sure that this page was compiled and generated exactly at https://varunbarad.com/blog/latest. For that I specified a permalink: "/blog/latest/" in the front-matter for that page. That way Jekyll knows where to put the final generated HTML file for that page.
Conclusion
That was all, a simple way to add a URL to your Jekyll site which will always take the visitor to your latest blog post. You can take a look at the full source code of my website over at GitHub or you can also find the full code of this “latest post redirect” page at this link.
If you want to talk with me about anything related to this feel free to reach out to me on twitter @varun_barad
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