For no particular reason, I started wondering if I could add sidenotes to my blog. I've always liked them better than endnotes, especially for longer documents. This led me to the more general question: Is there an eleventy template for sidenotes?
The answer is yes. But before plunging in, I decided to try a fresh blog first. My repository of medieval ghost stories (forked from an earlier repo) seemed like a useful test case.
It was also a hard test case: these are scholarly documents, and the notes are long and dense -- exactly the case that Tufte-CSS based sidenote solutions don't handle well. I ended up using a javascript based solution that I found on the web.
The result is the Twelve Medieval Ghost Stories website.
It looks great; the sidenotes work really well, and drop down to regular endnotes on narrow browsers. But the grid-based paradigm this solution uses seems really brittle, and I don't want to restructure my entire blog template to support it.
So back to thinking about Tufte-CSS. But this wasn't a waste; I've learned some potentially useful things, and this is a fairly nice presentation of the ghost stories. I'll just let it percolate in my head for a little longer.