February 12, 2015

Bigfoot.js Footnotes

Over the past several months a bunch of blogs I follow have wrote about Bigfoot footnotes. It is a bit of javascript and css that allows you to have fancy footnote popovers.1 Now, I don't tend to use a whole lot of footnotes on this blog2, so I didn't pay a whole lot of attention. This week I decided I was going to figure out how to make it work as more of a challenge than anything else.

Most of the sites I saw using it were folks who had their own Wordpress install. Stephen Hackett posted on his Squarespace site how you could make it work on that platform. Here at pretendcritic I just run everything on google's blogger platform. It is nothing fancy, but I have been able to strip out all the default styling and replace it with my own thing. I know this blog is simple, but it looks nice and I feel like it provides a good experience for the readers. I've been impressed with the level of customization blogger offers. It has been able to do almost everything I want to.3 A few months ago I was able to update my styling to look acceptable on the iPad & iPhone, something I thought I'd never figure out how to do, but ultimately was very simple.

At first adding bigfoot.js to blogger did not seem like it was going to be easy. Well I was wrong. Once it dawned on me how simple it was to pull in hosted files from Dropbox or Google Drive getting bigfoot to work was trivial. I think they look awesome. Next I need to figure out how to make a site search that doesn't stink.

  1. Like this little guy here.  
  2. I have a feeling you are going to see a lot more in the future.  
  3. There are still a few major limitations that I have not been able to get around. I'm sure eventually I will leave blogger behind.