Displaying featured posts on hugo homepage

During the last set of blog updates of February, I decided to change my homepage to make it leaner (by removing most of the text), but I also changed the content lists displayed.

The homepage now display:

• Last 5 featured blog posts
• Last 5 featured gemlog entries
• Last 3 bookmarks
• Last updated page

The last 2 are just a change in the number of items being retrieved, whereas the first two are a changed of which items are retrieved.

Before this update, the 5 latest blog posts and gemlog entries were displayed here. It meant that, while always up to date, I didn’t have control of what was displayed. I thought about it for some time, and decided that the homepage should display what I want first time visitors to see first. The full lists are one click away for people to see all articles. But I like to highlight specific ones on the homepage.

The new rule is will display the last 5 posts tagged as featured. I can mark posts as featured = 1 in the frontmatter area (see example) if I decide they should “make the frontpage”. Only the 5 latest with the feature tag are displayed. If one day I want to resurface an old post, I’ll have to remove newer featured posts. A good mix between control and automation I believe.

Anyway, to tag a post (or gemlog or page) as featured, all I need is to add in the frontmatter part of my markdown content featured: 1.

Then, on the homepage, I have a loop displaying only the 5 latest featured:

<ul>
    {{ range first 5 (where (where site.RegularPages "Section" "posts") "Params.featured" "eq" 1) }}
        <li>
            <div class="post-title">
                {{ .Date.Format "2006-01-02" }} <a href="{{ .RelPermalink }}">{{ .Title }}</a>
            </div>
        </li>
    {{ end }}
</ul>

Change the posts in the where clause to gemlog and you have the list of the latest 5 featured gemlog entries.

You can see the full code of my homepage partial template on sourcehut.