A Quick Post on Footnotes

            This post is partially the result of me realizing that I have not yet written about my final journey with the footnotes which has been a slightly frustrating but ultimately victorious venture; however, this post is also partially the result of me procrastinating writing up my reflection on my final project. ^[1]

            A long time ago, aka two months ago, I thought it would be a great idea to write all my unnecessary yet (in my opinion) generally entertaining thoughts in a foot note so that the body of my post would not become an unreadable mess. However, I can’t just transfer over the footnotes that I made in Microsoft Word to Blogger because, as my professor explained, what Microsoft does behind the scenes to get footnotes to work has to be done manually and explicitly by me first in Blogger. I began to write of this phenomenon here, and even though it did not help me make footnotes in Blogger, it did provide me with helpful information on how to best format my posts. ^[2] In Blogger, for those of you who have not used it, you have two modes when writing your post: the compose view and the HTML view. Blogger’s posts work with HTML code, which according to my professor stands for “Hyper Text Markup Language,” so if you want to add in certain features, such as foot notes, then you need to do it in the HTML view. Given that I had never worked with code in any form prior to this class, my professor found and showed me this tutorial that showed me how to write the HTML code I needed. ^[3]

           That tutorial was a lifesaver and enabled me to have functioning footnotes in my posts—hurray! Alas, my journey was not yet over—for some reason, after I posted to my blog the footnotes in the body of the post stopped linking to the notes at the bottom. Even stranger, the ones at the bottom still linked to the numbers in the body. All this meant was that I had to go back into the post and rewrite the code but it was both time consuming and frustrating so, obviously, I had to figure out how to solve it. To explain why the footnotes were behaving strangely requires a little explanation into how they work. A footnote is essentially a link to a different and specific location on the document, but in order to link to that location you first have to name the location. The part of the footnote in the body of the post was somehow having the link part erased meaning that it still had a name and thus could be linked to by the bottom footnote, but it could not reciprocate said linking (hopefully that makes sense). Anyway, to make an already too long story short, the linking kept erasing because once I created the footnote a space would appear between the footnote and the period of the sentence it was appearing after:

This space looks ugly to me so I would backspace until the footnote was directly next to the period like so:

 

Yet by making it look pretty, I was also inadvertently erasing the link. Sadly, I can’t get around this meaning that if I wanted to the footnote to work properly, I had to keep the ugly space. *weary sigh* As my professor explained, the M in HTML means markup which “means controlling the appearance of both the document itself as well as components (even individual characters). Thus, it is both powerful and finicky.” Even though the footnotes’ appearance offends my delicate sensibilities, I think that this venture was successful because I both learned something new and got my footnotes to work!

 

 

 ^[1] It is surprisingly hard to write a reflection on my process of working with Python without just detailing what I did which would likely be both boring and too jargony for my liking.

 ^[2] In case you don’t want to read my other post, the main point was that if you initially write your post in Word then you should save it as a filtered HTML document prior to copying and pasting into Blogger. If you don’t, then unnecessary Microsoft specific code gets copied into Blogger as well which becomes a problem if you, like me, are a novice with code because it makes the HTML very hard to read and work with.

 ^[3] I did try looking for tutorials myself and I had even found the one he gave me, but I hadn’t thought I could use it because it is written specifically for Wordpress, one of the many hosting sites you can use to make a website and/or blog. My professor explained that because the person used HTML code in their tutorial, I could use their tips on Blogger as well since HTML works the same way no matter the site. Also, I apparently edited my first post to include the link to this tutorial which I don't remember doing haha. So now you have it twice.