Author bio and support
Ruben Schade is a technical writer and infrastructure architect in Sydney, Australia who refers to himself in the third person in bios. Hi!
The site is powered by Hugo, FreeBSD, and OpenZFS on OrionVM, everyone’s favourite bespoke cloud infrastructure provider.
If you found this post helpful or entertaining, you can shout me a coffee or send a comment. Thanks ☺️.
This throwaway line on my recent post about replacing social networks with RSS generated some interest:
But not for the reasons I thought. Re-enabling something again sounds like something Yogi Berra would say. It’s completely superfluous to mention, unless I had disabled blog comments once before. Which I hadn’t. So why am I even bothering to
@Georgina posted this comment on The Twitters:
That’s a good point, I hadn’t even considered all those paid blogs regurgitating the same stuff everywhere. In my head those aren’t blogs, they’re something else.
As for enabling comments, it raises a key concern: I statically generate my site, like a gentleman. It means my posts, themes, and other site assets are all in version control. I don’t need databases or an interpreter or server-side caching to limit hits to the software; the pages themselves are the cache. But it limits what I can do.
If I wanted to enable blog comments again, there are really only two choices:
Implement something like Disqus on my static pages, which is reasonably the only game in town. I don’t like this because I dislike JS, and I’m concerned about tracking.
Run a CMS again. This is a big jump in terms of server requirements, and negates all the convenience and performance of static sites, but puts the code server-side where it belongs.
I’m torn. I’m leaning towards 2, but 1 would let me flip the switch today. Maybe I’d include 1, but have instructions on how to block it? Or research Disqus alternatives?
Or if I went with 2, what would I do? I’d want something that runs on Postgres at a minimum, but none of the popular blog platforms support it without potentially breakable shims. Or do I roll my own?
Loyal Rubenerd readers, whaddya reckon?