Bigfoot Footnotes in Jekyll

Like the good doctor, I knew as soon as I saw Bigfoot that I would be adding it to this site. ¹ I’ve avoided footnotes up till now because the HTML formatting for them seemed far too fiddley, and the Jekyll Markdown processor I was using did not support them.

It turns out that adding support for footnotes in Markdown was as simple as replacing redcarpet with kramdown in the Jekyll configuration. Now, instead of mucking about with HTML that looks like this:

    <sup id="fnref:1">
        <a href="#fn:1" rel="footnote">1</a>
    </sup>

<div class="footnotes"><ol>
    <li class="footnote" id="fn:1">
        <p>footnote.<a href="#fnref:1" title="return to article"> ↩</a><p>
    </li>
</ol></div>

I can have nicely formatted Markdown footnotes in my text, like this:

Footnote inline [^1]

[^1]: The footnote text

It may not amount to much, bit I think it’s a nice addition to the site.