meta

One obvious thing static site generators like Jekyll have always lacked is a commenting system. Commenting generally involves POSTing data to a system which, in turn, does something with it and finally adds the comment to the site.

Static HTML files cannot receive POST requests and re-write their content. So we need to resort to JavaScript and third-party services such as Disqus. Which is what I’ve just done for this site.

Comments are content

While services like Disqus are nice it bothers me to have to be depending on them. It bothers me even more that content from my site is now hosted elsewhere. Also: Disqus now has the power to add stuff to my site: ads, ‘related comments’ and all that…

You can’t blame these services: they provide an easy to use feature for ‘free’. In return they partly ‘own’ your pages.

I like comments. Sure: they are not without problems but I like reading your thoughts in the context of my content to which they apply. Twitter’s great but ‘commenting’ on a blogpost on Twitter disconnects the comment from the content and soon the comments will have disappeared in the stream of tweets. Comments on the pages of my content will remain there. Unless I decide to switch from Disqus to something else, or Disquss goes away, or…

So: I have added Disqus to this site for now although I am far from happy with it. I am thinking of ways to ‘fix’ this and I have some ideas. What about you?


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