I love hosting my blog on GitHub by way of Jekyll but the Liquid templating system is far from a robust scripting language in my opinion. With the rise of Medium, I’ve been seeing the read time on more and more articles and figured it was time to add the same functionality to my own site. I had checked this post out but they did not compensate for inline images in the same way Medium does.
Instead of attempting to will Liquid into doing my bidding I figured I would slap together a solution that could be used on any static site and would not be dependent on a single templating engine. I know what you’re thinking, “there’s already other plugins out there that do this”. Hell yeah there are! But after doing a small bit of research I started to feel like all of the existing solutions were a bit too bloated for my needs. To quote Full Metal Jacket:
This is my rifle. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
Well jquery.readtime is my jquery plugin. There are many others like it, but this one is available for immediate consumption over on GitHub. Oh and it’s super light too 😉
