Nate Dickson

What I think.

(Mostly) MultiMarkdown Blogging in Octopress

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:

kramdown now
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.

  1. All the other MultiMarkdown features are amazingly useful as well, but footnotes are just integral to my writing.

  2. 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.

  3. And a lot of other very nice features.

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