Adding Comments to My Jekyll Site
I've been working on adding support for comments over the last few months. On a static site, that's hard, but it's finally done.
A few months ago Maurice Renck and I were having a conversation on the Fedi (I think) and he mentioned that he would prefer to leave a comment than send me an email. Since then I’ve also seen a few other people talk about how they like to see a comments section on blogs. So while I’ve been pissing about with Jekyll recently, I decided to build a commenting system for this site.
Why not use something that already exists?
That’s a fantastic question, dear reader, and the answer is that all the solutions I’ve found are either too expensive, not privacy focused, or don’t appear to be getting regular updates.
<RANT>
Why are commenting systems so bloody expensive? Like, they’re pretty simple, so why on earth does it cost more than the VPS that hosts the entire site to have what basically equates to an embedded form and a teeny-weeny DB that stores maybe a few hundred KB of plaintext?
Especially when a very small percentage of people are likely to bother leaving a comment.
</RANT>
Annnnyyyyywwwwwwaaaaaayyyyyy…….
For the last month or so, I’ve been working away on creating my own commenting system that has the features that I’d want to see, which are:
- Independent of the site they work with so they can be easily removed if I want to (embedded by loading a JS script).
- Be privacy focussed - no tracking or requirements to login/create an account.
- Send email notifications via Amazon SES when someone submits a new comment, or when someone replies to your comment (if you provided an email).
- Have a simple admin UI where I can approve/delete comments before they’re published, and reply.
My little commenting system is now live available at the bottom of this and every other post on this site. I’m fully expecting there to be the odd bug - if you find any, please do let me know.
Here’s a peek at what the admin UI looks like when someone comments (right-click > open in new tab to enlarge):
What’s next?
I’m thinking about releasing the source code for this so other folk can have a commenting system on their own site.
I’m also considering developing this to a point where I can offer it as a hosted solution for others to use, but I’m not sure I want that in my life. If I do, it won’t be expensive.
In the meantime, if you want to leave a comment, the form is below.