EDIT: Comments are disabled again. I didn’t like having to maintain that infrastructure. Boo!

As Jeff Atwood says, a blog without comments is not a blog. That means that today is the day that my blog becomes an actual blog!

Comments have always been an issue on this site, since I run it using a static site generator with a pretty UI on top. Thus, my site has been just plain files - and it’s been pretty darn fast.

But how can a static website have dynamic comments? Well, for that you just need a tiny service to serve up your comments. Traditionally, sites built with Jekyll and Hugo have used Disqus, which is a fairly good commenting system for the price.

But this site will never use Disqus. Why? Because I don’t want to use Disqus. Disqus is nonfree software, and potentially tracks your browsing. In any sort of discussion, your level of anonymity and privacy are directly proportional to your freedom of expression. So until Disqus is released under a free software license, I cannot morally include it on my site.

Anywho, I’m now hosting comments on this site using Commento. Commento is basically a microservice that fits my needs exactly. Unfortunately, it does require Javascript, but that isn’t so bad since (1) it doesn’t track you across the web (2) it’s self hosted and most importantly (3) it’s free-as-in-freedom.

Moreover, the nice thing about Commento is that it also supports OAuth2 logins from third parties that don’t want your data. Right now, it looks like it only supports Google as a third party. I will add more as Commento improves and becomes more mature in the future.

Comments, anyone?