Sometimes your blog posts need to explain things a little more deeply. Maybe you need to cite a source or even update a post with new information. Adding in extra or new information can get messy, especially if you’re trying to maintain the integrity of your post.
The writing gods created footnotes as a solution to this problem, (let’s also not forget that technical writers were going to riot if they didn’t come up with a solution. I suppose this could have been a footnote.) There is a slight problem, though. You’re writing these posts in WordPress, and there is no way to quickly change the style sheet for the entire website just to add in a few footnotes.
As usual, there’s a plugin to the rescue for this one. FD Footnotes adds elegant footnotes with ease. This plugin creates super script numeral hyperlinks that when clicked, scrolls the page down to the footnote section; And they’re very simple to insert. Here is an example of how to use them within your post and what they look like to your readers:
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Here is another example of a blog using footnotes within a post. The red super script links to the bottom of the post where the footnotes are positioned.
FD Footnotes is good-looking and very customizable. It takes the pain out of having your developers hardcode footnotes into your sites and makes it even easier to test, because it’s a plugin.
Do you use footnotes on your blog, or could you? Can you think of a few blog who might benefit from this plugin? Let’s discuss in the comments.
The problem with this plugin is that the author/writer has to wrap his/her mind around using square braces in their text in order to add their footnotes. Most of the authors I work with are familiar with how MS Word inserts footnotes. So the use of braces and the placing of the text of the note within their article is just confusing. I would love to see someone develop a plugin that placed a button on the tool bar of the edit window that would be used to insert the text of the footnote. All my writer/authors would need to do would be to place the cursor where the note number needs to be in the text, click the button to bring up a text insertion box, type in the text of the note and press OK. The plugin would take care of the numbering, tracking and placement of the actual notes. Now that would truly be “adding footnotes with ease within WordPress”! For most authors I know this plugin’s method is messy, confusing and not easy.