On my other blog, I use links to Wikipedia or YouTube an awful lot, and since I’m a fancy person, I added FontAwesome icons next to them, indicating to my readers where a link would take them. For a long time, I had to add those icons manually in my Markdown, wasting a lot of time looking up the exact syntax into another article, and just copy-pasting stuff around, which is nowhere near optimal.
Yes, Jekyll does already have tags. Not HTML, Liquid.
Which means your Markdown is now peppered with \{\% those "ugly-ass-tags" \%\}. No, I want HTML, I want standards!
Similar to WordPress, Jekyll handles plugins, with a powerful hook system. The one that interests us here is :post_render.