Tag: Wordpress

Easy Footnotes Adding Footnotes to Your WordPress Blog Post

Kris Hocker on 17 Apr 2016

FD Footnotes example

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.

Cite This Page Plugin

Kris Hocker on 28 Dec 2012

Cite This Page plugin

I recently had a question from another blogger about the page citation that I display on every post and some pages. I don’t use a plugin to add it to the page—I wrote the PHP myself and included in my templates. But it got me thinking about how it could be useful as a plugin for other genealogy bloggers who self-host their WordPress blogs.

So, I spent the morning putting together a simple plugin. The plugin is currently configured to appear only on posts (only on the individual post page, not the main index page), not pages, and does not include any options for customization. For an example of what it displays, please see the end of this post (gray box not included).

So, how does it put the citation together? The first name and last name comes from those fields in the post author’s user profile. The page title and site name come from post title and blog name and description. The modified date is generated from the last time the page was saved and the accessed date is generated from the current date.

I am looking for testers to make sure that it will work and who can provide feedback and suggestions to make it work better. If you’d like to participate, please get in touch.