Hello Mike, from the future

This is not really a post from the future, but it is used to solve a problem.

The Problem

On the blog listing, I wanted to show a different number of posts on the first page (8) than the rest of the pages (9). Eleventy, the Static Site Generator I used to build this site, doesn't have a nice way to do this.

The solution

Future Post (aka this one)

I created a post that has a future date, of 1st January 2500.

---
title: 'Future Post that will be removed'
date: '2500-01-01'
tags: ['Future', 'Eleventy']
description: 'If you are seeing this, …
---

Filter out the future post

In order to do this I check if the posts date is not 1st January 2500.

{% if item.data.date != "2500-01-01" %}
  code that I want goes here
{% endif %}

Set a reminder to update in 2500

As I may want to post an article on 1st January 2500, I have set a calender reminder to fix this hack in the future.

Why 'Hello Mike…'

Well it was my good friend Mike that came up with the original idea for solving this:

I would approach this by having a dummy entry in whatever data you're paginating, either at the start or at the end, which has a property set to say that it should not be displayed. #hack @eleven_ty

Quote Source @PermittedSoc - Twitter

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