Today I went down a little rabbit hole. I wanted to be able to include footnotes in my posts. And though I promptly found the footnote-octopress plugin to do just that, that wasn’t enough for me. I like footnotes, but I don’t really want to scroll down on longer posts just to read them. That just takes you out of the reading experience. What I wanted was a JavaScript that generates a popup on mouseover. After a bit of digging I found just that on Lukas Mathis’ blog. Unfortunately it took me some time to get it working.1 The problem was that the required jQuery didn’t get along with Ender, which is used quite a bit in the classic Octopress theme.2 The solution was to override the $-function for jQuery with

jQuery.noConflict()

and exchange all the $ with jQuery.

I forked the plugin and added the script if you want to give it a try. Check it out on Github.

As I was writing this I noticed the markdown syntax isn’t working in the footnotes. I’ve got to check into that sometime… - Done.

  1. I really should learn to write JavaScript myself… or at least understand it better. ↩︎

  2. Yep, I don’t use the classic theme, but my sidebar is borrowed from it. ↩︎