So, my big concern in moving over to Octopress was the lack of MultiMarkdown compatibility. Specifically the lack of footnotes. I think in footnotes a lot of the time¹.

So it was a definite problem to go to something limited to vanilla markdown. I did a few million hours of web searching to find a way to use MultiMarkdown as my renderer, but for some reason Jekyll is surprisingly resistant to the idea, so I gave up.

For a while. I’m not good at actually giving up. I had made my peace with using non-footnoted code for blogging and had moved on, until I noticed that Brett Terpstra, who documented his own move to Jekyll based blogging a few months ago, had footnotes aplenty on his blog². So I asked him how he was pulling that off.

Here’s his answer, in it’s entirety:

I just use Kramdown as my processor. Works way better than Maruku or Rdiscount for me. -Brett

That’s it, folks. I made a single change to my _config.yml file:

1

markdown: kramdown

Bingo! Footnotes³ now work and you get to jump around a lot more when you read my blog.

So that’s it really. If you’ve been looking for a way to use MultiMarkdown features in your Octopress blogging the problem is really much simpler than you thought. Direct your thanks to Brett.