Quotebacks is a recently-developed JavaScript library for applying a standard styling to blockquotes on web pages. As released, it also includes a browser plugin for Chrome, that helps with capturing the quotes and applying the correct HTML.
However, if you don't use Chrome, and/or you prefer to write in Markdown, it's not ideal.
Luckily Matt Webb has written an extension for Python-Markdown which allows the writer to activate the Quotebacks styling using simple Markdown.
This plugin incorporates that extension into Nikola. The original code is MIT-licensed, which allows us to use it freely.
You'll have to have the quotebacks.js file installed, and have code in your config.py to import it from the CDN or reference it directly. See below.
To use it you'll need to make the quoteback.js library accessible to your site. You can either download it and keep a local copy, and then include something like the following in your EXTRA_HEAD_DATA constant in conf.py:
EXTRA_HEAD_DATA = """
<script src="/js/quoteback.js"></script>
"""
Or you can access it using the CDN, in which case you'll want the following:
EXTRA_HEAD_DATA = """
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/Blogger-Peer-Review/quotebacks@1/quoteback.js">
"""
To quote something using Quotebacks, include Markdown like this:
What is Nikola? The answer is here:
> Nikola is a static website and blog generator. The very short explanation is that it takes some texts you wrote, and uses them to create a folder full of HTML files. If you upload that folder to a server, you will have a rather full-featured website, done with little effort.
>
> -- Roberto Alsina and the Nikola contributors, [The Nikola Handbook](https://getnikola.com/handbook.html)
You need to format the footer of the blockquote as shown above:
- a blank, quoted line;
- followed by a quoted line with two hyphens, a space, the name of the author or authors, a comma and a space, then a Markdown-formatted link to the source.