25 lines
3.0 KiB
Markdown
25 lines
3.0 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Comments
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date: 2022-12-30
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permalink: /comments/
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tags: [jekyll, tinkering, post]
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---
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I've had two somewhat divergent goals in trying to get a functional Jekyll-based site up and running. The first is that I'm hoping to include a bit of tinkering with static site generators in this spring's iteration of DH 865, and while I'm not above assigning texts that I plan to read for the first time along with the class, assigning technologies that way is a recipe for disaster. (Not that I know that from first-hand experience. Ahem.)
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The second, though, is that I'm seriously contemplating getting my own blogging practice out of WordPress. I have loved using WordPress, don't get me wrong; it's powerful and generally reliable. But it's also presenting a growing amount of overhead to maintain, and what feels like increasing barriers to just writing already.
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Over the last couple of months I've been delighted to take control of my social network once again, through hcommons.social, as one important step toward the [IndieWeb](https://indieweb.org) ideal of owning my content and controlling its dissemination. And while WordPress is fully open source and IndieWeb-compatible, it's occurred to me that there might be a better way.
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So, Jekyll. I built this site using GitHub Pages[^1] and [Minimal Mistakes](https://github.com/mmistakes/minimal-mistakes), and spent a fair bit of time working to get [Mastodon-based comments](https://yidhra.farm/tech/jekyll/2022/01/03/mastodon-comments-for-jekyll.html) enabled. And then I used Ben Balter's [Jekyll Exporter](https://wordpress.org/plugins/jekyll-exporter/) to grab the content from [kfitz.info](https://kfitz.info) and move it over here.
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But: comments aren't part of that export. And I've got 20 years of discussions over there -- well, really 10 years of discussions before Twitter and Facebook destroyed everything -- that I really don't want to leave behind.
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There are several options for commenting systems that I could employ. A few are out of the question, including Disqus ([no](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/privacy-and-data-security/disqus-faces-3-million-sanction-over-alleged-gdpr-breaches)), Facebook (omg NO), and Discourse (open source, but with real hosting overhead). There are also [Utterances](https://utteranc.es) and [Giscus](https://giscus.app), which leverage GitHub issues and discussions, respectively, for comments. And several folks out there have developed tools to help migrate WP comments into those latter systems, so they're worth considering.
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But what then of the connection to Mastodon-based commenting, which I'm pretty excited about? I'd like to find a way for two commenting systems to co-exist, even if one is primarily looking backward and one looking forward. Alternatively, I'd like to get those WP comments imported as part of the content of the old WP posts.
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I'm going to keep tinkering, but if anybody has any brilliant solutions, I'd love to hear them.
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[^1]: Of course, if I'm really going to IndieWeb it, I shouldn't rely on GitHub. But I'll contemplate that another day.
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