Generate topic pages on Jekyll build

[mkiser]

I use Algolia for site search. It's really good. I would like to use a few faceted searches to produce static WTFJHT topic pages when the site builds (i.e. russia, health care, travel ban, etc).

This seems like an appropriate task for a Jekyll Generator plugin. When the site builds, make a call to the Algolia API for each topic I want to create, and build a single page per topic with all the responses in reverse-chron order using a specific template file.

The Algolia API returns a raw response and is indexed on p tags. So, theoretically (?), we could assemble all that HTML on the page and we'd be good to go. A nice to have bit would be to remove the leading 1/, 8/, 15/ slug.

Why static? I want them to have a simple permalink, be indexable in Google and shareable on social without the need of a query string.

I don't really know Ruby and am unclear if you can even make an API call from within a generator, return the data, and then build the page. There is probably a much better way of doing this... Suggestions?

[mkiser]

Going to handle this using the search pages from #606