Adding an <aside> element with 11ty

For some time now, I’ve been wanting to try using <aside> elements in this blog for … asides, I guess. You know, those “btw…” sorts of comments, but in cases where a footnote feels like too much faff. Thanks to the neighborhood crows, who were particularly escalated this morning at 5:45 right outside my bedroom window, I found myself with some extra time to devote to this. In case it’s helpful to anyone, here’s how I dunnit. First attempt: raw html At first I just used the <aside> html in my markdown post. But I quickly learned that this bypasses 11ty’s markdown processing (specifically, markdown-it’s processing with the typographer flag set to true), so quotes and apostrophes don’t get converted to the curly/fancy versions. Better: 11ty paired shortcodes To address the problem above, I added a paired shortcode in my eleventy.config.js file. Pertinent excerpts: // eleventy.config.js import markdownIt from "markdown-it"; export default async function (eleventyConfig) { // I already had…