this blog has comments (again)
Don't adjust your RSS reader, you're not seeing the same article twice. I just flip-flopped really hard with the whole comments thing.
In my (now unpublished) previous article, I said I went with Chirpy for comments... well, I'm not using them anymore! Oops! I am now using Comentario! Comments are enabled on all posts, feel free to leave some!!
Sorry to those who already did 🙈
Read below for the details of what happened here.
It turns out Chirpy was pretty limiting in that commenters could not update their own avatar at all if they didn't sign in with GitHub/Twitter/Google... Which is extremely silly[1].
I also wasn't happy with the fact that its widget rendered inside an <iframe> meaning customization options were limited to a few colors.
This sent me down the path of finding alternatives. I had found a couple that seemed promising, but Blau on Mastodon made me aware of Comentario which... I think, is perfect for what I want?
- ✅ Markdown formatting
- ✅ Comment replies
- ✅ Moderation UI/email notifications
- ✅ Custom user avatars
- ✅ Website field for authenticated users
- ✅ Anonymous posting (albeit limited)
- ✅ Authenticated posting
- There are also options to set up login with Google/GitHub/GitLab/Twitter, but I didn't dig into that just yet
- ✅ Does not render within an
<iframe>element so I can tweak everything with CSS to make it look good with my theme! I need to actually tweak that, but the default theme is Good Enough™️ for today. - And a bunch more features
The only downside being that there isn't any way to set it up without hosting it yourself. This is fine for me because I know how to do it, but I know a bunch of people who would benefit from that solution who can't/don't want to self-host.
Therefore, I think a "friends of damien eggbug" shared instance of Comentario could be a good idea? If we know each other, and you are interested (and/or would like to help share the costs of a VPS + domain name[2]), let's get in touch.
I will probably keep my own instance because I have no clue if it can be migrated from a machine to another without breaking everything, but I want people to have access to that thing because I feel it might just be It? Maybe? We will see.
Oh, and also, if you're interested in self-hosting it, I detailed my setup here.
See ya,
- damien