Creating An Automatic Postroll With Bear's Powerful Embed Feature

05 Jan, 2026

The more I build here on the blog, the more I realize just how powerful Bear's embedding post feature is.

When you combine the embed syntax with tags, you can really open up a lot of ways to make your blog feel dynamic, responsive and just plain cool.

For a few months I've been using these features to cleanly run a blog, notes feed and photos feed all in one. Soon after that, I realized I could use embeds to build out pages that would automatically log the most recent books, movies and energy drinks I've rated and written about.¹

Now, I'm doing the same to create an automatic postroll.

When I originally saw Jedda's postroll, I thought it was an awesome idea. I'd heard of blogrolls previously, of course, but never a postroll. And I agreed with her logic about postrolls being more useful than blogrolls.

But at the time I never thought seriously of starting my own.

The manual process of keeping it up to date, rolling posts off and then accounting for the rolled off posts with some sort of archival system just felt a bit too burdensome. I didn't want the blog to feel like a chore. And I already linked to plenty of things in my notes feed—so people who chose to follow that space would still be getting a postroll of sorts from me, just one that was a bit more ephemeral.

Bear's embed feature gives me the best of both worlds. All it requires is using the tag #postroll in any note that features a linked story/post/blog/article I want included in the postroll. The landing page itself just has a brief description and the following syntax:

{{ posts | tag:postroll | limit:15 }}

Voilà.

Now I have a postroll I don't have to manage at all. Plus, the tag itself serves as its own archive for anyone who stumbles across the page and wants to browse older posts they might have missed.

Maybe this will encourage you to start your own, or perhaps build something else entirely.

#blogs #meta