I've just updated my blog by adding something that is essential for traditional blogging: chronological indexing.

Won't spend much time explaining as you may see this messy blog source code on my GitHub

Idea 🔗

• Need to added field frontmatter.yearWithMonth to the page

  • That can be done by various plugins or simply in onCreateNode of /gatsby-node.js (see on GitHub)

  gatsby-node.js 🔗

  // ..
  // Create slugs for files.
  // Slug will used for blog page path.
  exports.onCreateNode = ({ node, actions, getNode }) => {
  // ...
  // exptract date elements for indexing
  // yearWithMonth allows concatenation otherwise difficult/impossible while
  // graphql aggregation/filtering
  if (node.frontmatter && node.frontmatter.updatedDate) {
      const parts = node.frontmatter.updatedDate.split('-')
      node.frontmatter.year = parts[0]
      node.frontmatter.month = parts[1]
      node.frontmatter.day = parts[2]
      node.frontmatter.yearWithMonth = parts.slice(0, 2).join('-')
  }
  // ...
  }

• Can query by that field to show year/month pages

  • You can add that query to any page you want to show calendar on (see on GitHub)

  # Get calendar
  calendar: allMarkdownRemark {
      group(field: frontmatter___updatedDate) {
          fieldValue
          totalCount
      }
  }

  • Also you can create component printing list of months like categories (see on GitHub)

• You can build pages for each month by groupingby newly created field

  • That can be done using createPages of /gatsby-node.js (Example on GitHub)

  exports.createPages = ({ graphql, actions }) => {
  const { createPage } = actions
  
  return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
      // added monthsPage to the templates
      const templates = ['blogPost', 'tagsPage', 'blogPage', 'monthsPage'].reduce(
      (mem, templateName) => {
          return Object.assign({}, mem, {
          [templateName]: path.resolve(
              `src/templates/${kebabCase(templateName)}.jsx`
          ),
          })
      },
      {}
      )
      // added yearWithMonth to frontmatter
      graphql(
      `
          {
          posts: allMarkdownRemark {
              edges {
              node {
                  fields {
                  slug
                  }
                  frontmatter {
                  tags
                  yearWithMonth
                  }
              }
              }
          }
          }
      `
      ).then(result => {
      if (result.errors) {
          return reject(result.errors)
      }
      const posts = result.data.posts.edges.map(p => p.node)
  
      // ...
      // Create months pages
      posts
          .reduce(
          (mem, post) =>
              cleanArray(mem.concat(get(post, 'frontmatter.yearWithMonth'))),
          []
          )
          .forEach(month => {
          createPage({
              path: `/blog/months/${kebabCase(month)}/`,
              component: slash(templates.monthsPage),
              context: {
              month,
              },
          })
          })
  
      resolve()
      })
  })
  }