BASEMENT.ORG

Ever have something to say in a post, and then decide that you'd like to tell a little side story in your blog? There reallly isn't an easy way to do that unless we take the time to reformat and tweak HTML to include these brief asides to the primary theme of our post.

You can use footnotes, but footnotes aren't very cool. They're at the bottom of your post - taking your reader away from the flow of your narrative. Besides, you'd still have to mark up your entry in some specialized way to denote the text as footnote text. There had to be a better way to simulate the elegance of web linking with static text.

The first offering from the arc90 lab is Unobtrusive Sidenotes. It's a dead simple way to include nicely highlighted sidenotes that live alongside your primary text. They're color-coded via CSS and require almost no technical know-how to implement. They're freely available under Creative Commons. You can see them in action here.