I recently added a simple ‘estimated reading time’ indicator to the posts on my blog - a simple enough task in PHP, and just as easy with static websites built with Jigsaw (like this one).

Calculating estimated reading time is a really simple algorithm:

  1. Find your total word count.
  2. Divide your total word count by an estimated Words Per Minute quantity e.g. 260 for non-fiction.
  3. The integer value is the number of minutes - if you wish to continue to calculate the number of seconds additional to this, multiply the decimal value (i.e. the value after the decimal point) by 0.60. However I feel it is sufficient to limit the calculation to minutes, so at this point I would round the number up to the nearest integer.

A simply function based on the above would be:

private function getEstimatedReadingTime($post, $wpm = 260)
{
    $wordCount = str_word_count(strip_tags($post));

    $minutes = (int) ceil($wordCount / $wpm);

    return $minutes . ' min read';
}

This function is part of the listener that we are going to create next:

<?php
// /listeners/GenerateEstimatedReadingTime.php

namespace App\Listeners;

use TightenCo\Jigsaw\Jigsaw;

class GenerateEstimatedReadingTime
{
    public function handle(Jigsaw $jigsaw)
    {
        $jigsaw->getCollection('posts')->map(function ($post) {
            $post->estimated_reading_time = $this->getEstimatedReadingTime($post);
        });
    }


    private function getEstimatedReadingTime($post, $wpm = 260)
	{
		...
	}
}

Here we get the posts collection, iterate through all the items in that collection, and add a new property called estimated_reading_time which will contain the proper value. Once our listener has been created we need to hook it to an event. In Jigsaw, every time we build our site, several events are fired, those events are:

  • beforeBuild
  • afterCollection
  • afterBuild

The one we are interested on is the afterCollection event. This event is fired after all collections have been processed but before any output files are written to disk. so let’s go ahead and register our listener. We do this in the bootstrap.php file as mentioned before.

// /bootstrap.php

$events->afterCollections(App\Listeners\GenerateEstimatedReadingTime::class);

With all this in place, the only thing missing is the adding this newly created value to our views. Personally I have a view partial for each post preview, but you can add it to anywhere that is in the scope of your individual post.

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