Plain text Jekyll excerpt plugin. How it works: - Reads markdown into html - Converts the html to plain text - grabs the first X characters (default 160) - adds to the post (use post.excerpt) Reasons I wrote it: - supports the ability to add your own excerpt in the front matter (does not override) - creates text-only excerpt for a footer message…

gistfile1.rb

require 'maruku'
require 'nokogiri'

module Jekyll

  class ExcerptBuilder < Generator
    safe true
    priority :high
    EXCERPT_LENGTH = 160

    def generate(site)
      site.posts.map! do |post|

        unless post.data['excerpt']
          html = ::Maruku.new(post.content).to_html 
          excerpt = ::Nokogiri::HTML(html).text[0..EXCERPT_LENGTH].gsub(/\n/, ' ')
          post.data['excerpt'] = excerpt.strip
        end

        post.data['excerpt'] += '&hellip;'
        post
      end
    end

  end

end