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
|
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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.
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All the other MultiMarkdown features are amazingly useful as well, but footnotes are just integral to my writing.↩
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I also knew that he’s a big fan of MultiMarkdown, seeing as he’s the creator of nvALT, Marked, and apparently worked with Fletcher T. Penny on the icon for MultiMarkdown Composer.↩
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And a lot of other very nice features.↩