I am an avid reader of The Magazine 1, and one of the first things you will notice when reading any issue is the clever handling of footnotes in their pieces. Commonly you will find these links to footnotes either inline or in the form of a tappable button with a symbol in it (in their case, a star) embedded throughout The Magazine’s thought-provoking paragraphs. Whenever you tapped one of these links, something kind of unique happened. Instead of being whisked away to the bottom of the page, the content of these footnotes would pop up instantly over the text in a modal window.

Read its contents. Tap anywhere outside of the modal. Done.

The popover disappears and you continue on with the article you were enjoying without having to tap a “scroll up” link or, worse, having to literally scroll back up to where you were previously.

I got used to this delightful bit of UI/UX rather quickly and instantly started searching for a way to implement the same effect into my own online prose.

Problem was, I couldn’t find anyone that was doing it. At least not at the time.

Fast Forward Six Months

Ironically where I ended up finding my answer was on the personal site of the original developer of The Magazine: Marco Arment’s Marco.org. He put up a post back in December stating how he too was searching for a way to implement these types footnotes into his site without having to develop his own javascript solution. Luckily, someone had already done it for him (and us). Bigfoot.js site screenshot

Believing in Bigfoot

A fella by the name of Chris Sauve went ahead and created Bigfoot and that opened the door to exactly what Arment and a handful of us were looking for: more useful and powerful footnotes on our sites!

Still, after implementing it on thaddeushunt.com, I immediately thought that its implementation wasn’t terribly approachable for everyday users. Surely someone must have created a WordPress plugin for this.  Maybe with some sort of shortcode for ease of use?

Well, it turns out that someone did that too.

Enter WP-Bigfoot…

A dramatic slow clap is due for Roger Stringer who took the time to create the WordPress plugin “WP-Bigfoot”. Not only is it a breeze to install and activate, but it’s also super easy to add to your posts and pages in WordPress via some short code. Screen Shot 2014-06-23 at 7.48.12 PM

And it doesn’t stop there either. Out of the box it looks pretty great, but if you have some chops with CSS you can even tweak the baked in style sheet to taste so that it better matches the aesthetic of your site! It’s also responsive, so it changes dynamically depending on what size screen it’s rendering on.2

[gallery type=“rectangular” ids=“7246,7245,7247”]

Great Solutions Rarely Come Easy…

There’s almost always something that needs to be tweaked or edited to fit your site and its needs. This is one of those rare occasions though where something works perfectly out of the box. Once I found what I was looking for, I was up and running in under 5 minutes. Seriously.

So if you’ve been looking for a better, more elegant and helpful way to add footnotes to your web-based content, I hope this post saves you some searching.

  1. And a very proud contributor! ↩
  2. Allowing your readership to enjoy these footnotes on the couch and on the go! ↩