Easy Footnotes Adding Footnotes to Your WordPress Blog Post

I’ve written before about the importance of citing your sources. But when you’re writing a blog post creating footnotes can be a bit of a problem. If you’re posting to a self-hosted WordPress blog, however, there is a simple solution.

When I first started writing my blog, I created my footnotes the hard way—inserting the HTML markup into the text for the footnote, then adding a section at the very end of the post and inserting the citations there.

blah blah blah.<sup>1</sup> Blah blah blah

This was awkward and time consuming.

Plugins

There are a number of plugins listed on WordPress.org for adding footnotes to posts or pages. Most of the ones I looked at required the use of shortcodes. A citation would be formatted like this:

[shortcode]This is the citation content.[/shortcode]

Each plugin had it’s own shortcode. Various plugins used [ref], [footnote], <fn>, etc.

This works. But again it’s awkward, especially if you’re not writing your post directly in the post editor.

FD Footnotes does not work that way. For this plugin you add your citation much like you’re adding an inline footnote. So, the citation would look like this in your text:

blah blah blah.[1.This is your footnote.] Blah blah blah.

The plugin automatically numbers and formats the footnote marker and places the footnote at the end of the post or page.¹

This works well for me. I write my posts in Scrivener, adding my footnotes as inline citations.² Then I copy the blog text and paste it into the WordPress editor. When you view the post, the citations have been converted to footnotes that you can click to view the full note.

With a little extra effort, I can later turn the blog post footnotes into Scrivener footnotes. This means I can easily reuse post content in a printed or electronic book I want to publish.

There’s really only one thing I don’t like about this process. It’s difficult for me to read/review the post one last time in the editor. I have to preview the post so that the plugin executes. Otherwise the inline footnotes interfere with my ability to easily read the text.

If you’re writing for a self-hosted WordPress blog and need footnotes, try out the FD Footnotes plugin and see if it fits your writing process.

• Category: Resources
• Tag: Wordpress