T w e n t y S i d e d
I recently got an email asking about the footnotes I use on this site. These sorts of questions pop up pretty often. People ask things like: Is there a plugin I can use? Did you come up with the idea yourself? How do you create them? The answers to which are No, No, and “It’s complicated”.
As many have suspected, I stole the idea for the footnotes from the XKCD “What-if?” series. I don’t remember when I first started using them. I just did a quick scan through the archives and found a footnote in a post from 2014, but I’m not sure how much further back they might go.
Over the years I’ve become so used to footnotes that I find it annoying to write without them. If I find myself writing a long email, I’ll usually end up with lots of awkward parenthetical statements that I wish I could turn into footnotes.
Before I had footnotes, I sometimes wrote nested parenthetical statements. They were fun to write, but they’re ugly as hell and very hard on readability.
There weren’t any footnote plugins available back when I first introduced this feature. I cobbled it together myself by stealing some javascript from the What-if page and making my own version. To get a footnote system working in WordPress you need to do what most modern web developers do and string a bunch of different systems and languages together into a big Rube Goldberg machine.
First is the syntax. You don’t want to clutter up your articles with tons of complex HTML. So I use a fairly minimalist shortcode that looks like this:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “About The Footnotes…”
