Jekyll on Github Pages: any way to add footnotes in Markdown?

Question

I've recently switched over to using Jekyll on Github Pages for my various blogs, and love that I can just push Markdown to Github and they handle the processing. I'd like to continue using it this way (rather than running Jekyll locally and just pushing the pre-generated site to Github), since the Github UI makes it easy to add and tweak posts if I'm not at my own machine.

There's just one thing I haven't been able to figure out: I can't get Markdown footnotes working. I'm using this style:

I bet you'd like more information about this sentence [^1].

[^1]: Well lucky for you, I've included more information in footnote form.

I did find one post (somewhere) that suggested enabling a footnotes extension for the redcarpet markdown processor, but this doesn't do it either:

markdown: redcarpet
redcarpet:
  extensions: ["footnotes"]

Is there any way to use Markdown footnotes without pre-generating the static site before pushing it to Github?

Answer 1

I use kramdown for markdown parsing and it handles footnotes nicely.

Change this line in your _config.yml file:

markdown: redcarpet

to:

markdown: kramdown