After some configuration and a whole lot of help from Travis Downs at Performance Matters, I’ve set up Staticman comments for this blog! This means that all comments are handled by my own personal little cloud app running on Heroku, interacting with html and Liquid code stored on the site itself. All this so I don’t have to outsource to an ad-driven social media alternative like Disqus or Facebook Comments. Also, as an added bonus, there’s no need to sign in to leave a comment. I’ve enabled comments for all prior posts, so go ahead and put your two cents in! Just try to be kind and courteous so I don’t have to enable manual moderation. Also bear in mind that comments might take about a minute to load after you post, because Staticman triggers the actual site to update itself instead of running dynamic JavaScript content like Disqus.

On a related note, I’ve chosen not to enable captchas for screen reader accessibility reasons. This means if there’s a sudden influx of bots, I may need to disable comments entirely. Theoretically, Staticman is compatible with the Akismet spam filter, but I haven’t been able to get it working just yet. I also plan to implement Mailgun reply notifications as soon as I can - nearly got it done for release, but I made a silly mistake, published my private API key to Github, and got my account temporarily locked down. Whoops. Next time I’ll try not doing that.

That’s about it! Enjoy. Just to reiterate, I would never have been able to set this up without extensive help from the guide above and the example code contained within. Thank you, Travis. May your crops grow tall and your code be free from bugs.