Static Site Comments?
A week ago I blogged about how I ditched WordPress for Hugo. One of the (at least temorary) casualties to that conversion was the loss of comments. I did export the comments for later inclusion into the site somehow, but I have yet to see an option I can live with for hosting them.
Here I’ll discuss the two obvious options.
🔗 Disqus
My original plan was to start using Disqus immediately. But then, maybe luckily, I stumbled across a website that uses Disqus while adblock was disabled. What I found was “Promoted Discovery”, or what I’d rather call: ads.
I’ve never had ads on my blog before and I don’t want to any time soon, especially if the income just exists to host comments.
🔗 Discourse
A friend of mine is crazy excited for Discourse, certainly more than is warranted, but after he showed me, and Atwood mentioned the use of Discourse for commments, and I’d decided against Disqus, I figured I might as well look into it.
While I was perusing the installation documentation I saw this line: “If your forum is expected to grow at all, be sure you have at least 2 GB of memory available to your Discourse instance. You might be able to squeak by with less, but we don’t recommend it, unless you are an expert.” While that’s couched in unclear, non-technical terms, the message is clear: less than 2 gigs of memory isn’t supported.
My Linode as a total of 1G (and currently still 512M since I haven’t rebooted it in 353 days!) Unless someone close to the Discourse team were to tell me that less than 512M will work for a relatively stable (10 comments a week?) blog, there’s no way that’s going to work.
So I’m back at square one. I could do some weird thing where I use ikiwiki + an iframe for comments until Hugo gets comment parity. Alternatively I could try to write some kind of OSS Disqus, or maybe help hack on Discourse and make enough features disablable that it can be nice and light.
But I’m not super likely to do any of that any time soon. Comments and even community is not the goal of my blogging. If you have ideas on how I can easily regain commenting on my blog you can always tweet at me, but in the meantime I’ll keep at blogging.
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