organizing featured posts in mediumish jekyll sites

Why Feature Posts in Jekyll Mediumish?

Featuring selected posts on your homepage helps highlight your best or most strategic content. In the Mediumish theme, you can manually select which posts to feature, giving you full editorial control. This is especially useful if you're running a content marketing blog, portfolio, or tutorial archive where some posts matter more than others.

Setting Up a Featured Flag

Open a few of your most important posts and add a new boolean key in the YAML front matter:

---
layout: post
title: "How to Customize Jekyll SEO Tags"
date: 2024-10-03
categories: [jekyll,seo]
featured: true
---

This featured: true flag will act as a simple filter that you can use in Liquid templates to selectively display content.

Modifying the Homepage to Display Featured Posts

Step 1: Locate the Homepage Template

In the Mediumish Jekyll theme, the homepage is typically controlled by the file index.html in your root folder or _layouts/home.html depending on the version. You’ll want to add a section for featured posts above the standard post loop.

Step 2: Add a Liquid Filter to Collect Featured Posts

Insert the following block before the normal post listing:

<section class="featured-posts">
  <h2>Featured Posts</h2>
  {% assign featured_posts = site.posts | where: "featured", true | sort: "date" | reverse %}
  {% for post in featured_posts %}
    <div class="featured-post-card">
      <a href="{{ post.url }}">
        <img src="{{ post.image }}" alt="{{ post.title }}">
        <h3>{{ post.title }}</h3>
      </a>
      <p>{{ post.excerpt | strip_html | truncatewords: 25 }}</p>
    </div>
  {% endfor %}
</section>

This will list the featured posts in descending order by publish date, showing their thumbnail, title, and excerpt.

Styling Featured Posts

You should add CSS rules in your main.scss or stylesheet to visually separate featured posts from regular ones:

.featured-posts {
  padding: 2rem 0;
  background: #f0f0f0;
  border-top: 2px solid #ccc;
  margin-bottom: 2rem;
}
.featured-post-card {
  margin-bottom: 1.5rem;
  padding: 1rem;
  background: white;
  border-radius: 10px;
  box-shadow: 0 4px 10px rgba(0,0,0,0.05);
}
.featured-post-card img {
  width: 100%;
  height: auto;
  border-radius: 8px;
}

Optional: Limit Number of Featured Posts

To prevent cluttering the homepage, you might only want to show 3 or 4 featured posts:

{% assign featured_posts = site.posts | where: "featured", true | sort: "date" | reverse | slice: 0, 3 %}

Case Study: Highlighting Evergreen Posts

A developer blog using Mediumish for a static portfolio decided to feature its top tutorials on GitHub Actions, Netlify deploy workflows, and Jekyll Liquid tricks. By placing these on top of the homepage and marking them featured: true, the click-through rate to those articles increased by over 60% within the first two weeks. Returning visitors often interacted with featured content first before scrolling down to recent posts.

Using Featured Posts in Sidebars or Footers

You’re not limited to using featured posts on the homepage. You can also apply the same logic to sidebars, tag pages, or even footers. For instance, in _includes/sidebar.html you can include:

{% assign sidebar_featured = site.posts | where: "featured", true | sort: "date" | reverse | slice: 0, 2 %}
<div class="sidebar-featured">
  <h3>Top Reads</h3>
  <ul>
    {% for post in sidebar_featured %}
      <li><a href="{{ post.url }}">{{ post.title }}</a></li>
    {% endfor %}
  </ul>
</div>

Conclusion

By tagging and featuring your most valuable content, you're not only guiding your readers to what matters most—you’re also defining your blog’s focus. The Mediumish Jekyll theme makes it easy to implement and style featured posts using simple front matter flags and Liquid filters, creating a more intentional user experience that rewards both SEO and returning visitors.