I switched to a slightly different format in the home page to display the date first followed by the post titles. In addition to the format change, I wanted to truncate the titles that are longer than 40 characters to display only the first 40 characters followed by 3 dots or “…” at the end. The key to making this possible was to use Jekyll’s advanced filters, and in particular, using the truncate filter. Swapping the order of date and post titles was the easy part, but the key was using the truncate filter.

Here’s the code.

post.title | downcase | truncate: 40, ' ...'

The downcase filter converts post.title to lowercase.

The truncate filter truncates post.title longer than 40 characters and adds 3 dots at the end.

Truncate requires 2 parameters: the length of the string and the characters to append to the string.