This site is created with Jekyll using the Minima theme. The footnotes are created with Bigfoot. Sherif Soliman, whose site design I aped, made an excellent tutorial on getting Bigfoot footnotes to work in Jekyll.

I’d just like to clarify one of his instructions. It took me weeks of frustrating trial and error to realize that the main.scss file referred to in Soliman’s instructions is not the same thing as the minima.scss file. The main.scss file should be copied to your _assets directory in your site’s root folder. Create one if you don’t already have one.

My main.scss file initially looked like this:

---
# Only the main Sass file needs front matter (the dashes are enough)
---

@import "minima";

I got Bigfoot working by adding "bigfoot-number" between the @import "minima" statement and the closing ; like this:

---
# Only the main Sass file needs front matter (the dashes are enough)
---

@import "minima",

"bigfoot-number"
;

Good luck!

Notes:

At the time of this writing, my Jekyll version is 3.8.2. My Minima version is 2.5.0. My Bigfoot version is 2.1.1.

For the curious, main.scss seems to be where you would create and modify elements and classes like blockquotes or footers, or add a wrapper to make embedded videos responsive. The minima.scss file defines defaults for variables like font size, spacing, and text color.