My preference: using author-date referencing with a reflist rather than footnotes makes it easier to see what the aside is about, and allows you to include such

My preference: using author-date referencing with a reflist rather than footnotes makes it easier to see what the aside is about, and allows you to include such relevant information as the title of the paper and where it was published together at the end of the page in the reflist. Bundling all this information inline is distracting if it happens more than once or twice. There's no reason why the hyperlinks shouldn't be to the papers themselves if you follow this system. Putting digressions, rather than just sources, in footnotes is what annoys me. It's just lazy: "I wanted to say this as well, so I'll slap it into a footnote instead or figuring out how to say it in a readable way. So footnote 1, Incidentally it is amusing to note, blah, blah...", leaving the reader with the choice of following the footnote and spoiling the flow of the main post, or not following it and missing whatever the writer had thought was worth writing down. They make distractions, they don't avoid them.