Adding giscus Comments

One day after the tenth anniversary of this blog, and I’m already making changes?!?

Yes, you read that right.

In both of the original incarnations of this website, via Squarespace and WordPress, I had a commenting system available and enabled, although I never received much feedback from it. If I’m honest, it was mostly spam, actually. And so, when I migrated to Hugo, I didn’t make finding a comment solution a high priority.

However, that’s not to say that I didn’t keep considering the options though. I glanced at some of the standard solutions (such as Discus & Commento), but as this site does not generate any income and only has a small number of monthly page views, I wasn’t ready to spend money just for comments.

Then, about a year ago, I got the idea to try out giscus, after reading Alan Pope’s blog post on the topic. Giscus looked interesting, but at the time I was unsure of exactly how involved I wanted to be in my blog, and so I simply filed the idea in in my Someday/Maybe list as a future possibility.

That all brings us to the past 24 hours, when, after writing my 10-year anniversary post, I began wondering what I could do to expand on my existing site. The idea of a way for readers to interact with me outside of Mastodon came to mind, and I once again began researching comment solutions. And, after reading many blog posts, Reddit threads, and examining features and pricing structures, I settled on giscus as a simple method for adding comments and reactions to my posts.

So what now? For my part, I’ll continue to post, and attempt to increase the frequency of my writing, as it’s good for me to push myself some creatively. And for you, dear reader: comments and reactions are now welcome!