Jekyll Target Blank

Sick of writing raw HTML anchor tags in your markdown or forcing your writers to add more technical attributes such as:

[External link](https://rubygems.org/gems/jekyll-target-blank){:target="_blank"}

Well, I was, and so were some of my clients. That’s how this project came alive. Jekyll Target Blank forces all external links to open in a new tab or window within Jekyll pages, posts and collections.

Pimp out your external links

As of version 1.1.0 Jekyll Target Blank includes some cool new features.

Security

Adds rel="noopener noreferrer" by default. ❤️ to @buren for your contribution.

This new default behaviour can be configured as detailed below 😉

️️🌶️ Added spice

• Control which links are opened in a new browser tab.
• Automatically add CSS class names to your external links.

Installation

Add the following to your site's Gemfile

gem 'jekyll-target-blank'

and add the following to your site's _config.yml

plugins:
  - jekyll-target-blank

Note: if jekyll --version is less than 3.5 use:

gems:
  - jekyll-target-blank

Usage

By default. all anchor tags and markdown links pointing to an external host, other than the one listed as the url in Jekyll's _config.yml will automatically be opened in a new browser tab once the site is generated.

All the links in pages, posts and custom collections are included except for plain text links.

Examples

HTML

The following HTML anchor tag:

<a href="https://google.com">Google</a>

will be replaced with:

<a href="https://google.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Google</a>

..unless your website's URL is google.com 😉

Markdown

[Google](https://google.com)

will be generated as:

<a href="https://google.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Google</a>

Configuration

No custom configuration is needed for using this plugin, however, you can override some default behaviours and also make use of some extra features as explained in this section.

Override the default behaviour

You can override the default behaviour and only force external links to open in new browser if they have a CSS class name included with the same value as the one listed in the Jekyll _config.yml file.

To override this automation, add an entry in your site's config.yml file, specifying which CSS class name a link must have for it to be forced to open in a new browser:

target-blank:
    css_class: ext-link

With the above setting, only links containing the class="ext-link" attribute will be forced to open in a new browser.

Automatically add additional CSS Classes

You can also automatically add additional CSS classes to qualifying external links. This feature is useful when you want to add CSS styling to external links such as automatically displaying an icon to show the reader that the link will open in a new browser.

You can add one or more space separated CSS classes in _config.yml like so:

target-blank:
    add_css_classes: css-class-one css-class-two

The above example will add class="css-class-one css-class-two" to the generated anchor tag. These CSS class names will be added in addition to any other existing CSS class names of a link.

Override the default rel attributes

For security reasons, rel="noopener noreferrer" are added by default to all the processed external links. You can override adding any of the noopener and noreferrer values with the following entries in your site's _config.yml file.

To exclude the noopener value:

target-blank:
   noopener: false

To exclude the noreferrer value:

target-blank:
   noreferrer: false

To exclude both noopner and noreferrer values:

target-blank:
   noopener: false
   noreferrer: false

Adding additional rel attribute values

You can add additional rel="" attribute values by simply specifying them in your site's _config.yml file.

target-blank:
    rel: nofollow

or even more than one extra:

target-blank:
    rel: nofollow

Note:

The rel setting overrides other default rel attribute values. Therefore, (for example), if you exclude the noopener value and then add it to the rel property, it will still be added. The following config:

target-blank:
    noopener: false
    rel: noopener

will output:

<a href"https://some-external-website.what" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Some link</a>

Support

Contributing

1. Fork it 
2. Create your feature branch (`git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

Testing

rake spec
# or
rspec

Credits

Legal

© 2018 - 2022 - Keith Mifsud https://keith-mifsud.me and approved contributors.