I believe it is a good idea to estimate the reading time of every post and display it to readers following the post excerpts.

There are plenty of Jekyll plugins that support realizing this feature, but I don’t suggest using them if you want to deploy your blog on Github Pages.

So I tried to write the below trick code to realize this feature.

{% assign words = post.content | strip_html | strip_newlines | remove: " " | size %}
{% assign time = post.content | strip_html | strip_newlines | remove: " " | size 
| divided_by: 400 | plus: 1 %}

<footer>
  <div style="margin-top:25px">
	<a class="post-link" href="{{ post.url | relative_url }}">
		<span class="icon-clock morebox" >Reading time: {{ time }} 
        {%if time > 1 %} mins
        {% else %}min{% endif %}, {{words}} words.<br>      Continue read...</span>
    </a>
  </div>
</footer> 

The method is straightforward,

• Statistics the words count of every post. Actually a more simple and pure Liquid code is like this:

{% assign words = content | number_of_words %}

But Jekyll’s built-in filter number_of_words cannot accurately count the number of Chinese words. If you have Chinese words to calculate, you can use Liquid’s size filter to avoid this problem. In order to make statistics more accurate, it is better to ignore all HTML tags and blank lines before calculation.

• Get a value of WPM (word per minute), by google the WPM value, a person can read 300-500 words per minute on a computer monitor. I read fast and I think it can be a bigger value, but I set a median of 400 here for my blog.
• The rest work is easy, we only need to calculate the reading time by dividing word count with WPM.

Next, I create a read_time.html in my _includes folder and put all this code into it to well organize them.

I just include the read_time.html in my post layout.

{% include reading_time.html %}

That’s all. If you want to get all code, fork it here.