A recent visitor to the IRC channel #octopress was wondering how they could have both regular pagination and sticky posts that always show up on the first page.

Seemingly simple, the proffered solutions did not seem to fit the bill. This is the way I’ve solved this.


Proposed solutions

The ideas proposed included doing something to keep the post far in the future, thus sorting out first always in the paginator. This seemed a bit too hacky.

Another offered adding a sticky page variable in the front matter. This has a lot of promise, and could work, but gathering up the posts which are sticky would probably require writing a plugin.

Yet another was to add a sticky category to the post in the front matter. This can work as well, and has the advantage of not needing a new plugin.

Using a sticky category

This seems simplest and most accessible, although requiring more alteration of the index.html file in the source directory.

The implementation is shown in the following gist:

The post itself gets a sticky category and the index.html file is changed to display sticky posts on the first page.