Day 45 - Comments as simply as possible

How little server can I involve in giving myself a commenting system?
Close up photo of keyboard keys.
| 'TYPE' by SarahDeer is licensed with CC BY 2.0 |

Project Scope and ToDos

  1. Static Site Generator that can build the blog and let me host it on Github Pages
  2. I want to write posts in Markdown because I'm lazy, it's easy, and it is how I take notes now.
  3. I don't want to spend a ton of time doing design work. I'm doing complicated designs for other projects, so I want to pull a theme I like that I can rely on someone else to keep up.
  4. Once it gets going, I want template changes to be easy.
  5. It should be as easy as Jekyll, so I need to be able to build it using GitHub Actions, where I can just commit a template change or Markdown file and away it goes. If I can't figure this out than fk it, just use Jekyll.
  6. I require it to be used by a significant percent of my professional peers so I can get easy answers when something goes wrong.
  7. I want source maps. This is a dev log site which means whatever I do with it should be easy for other developers to read.

  • Also this TOC plugin mby?

  • Use Data Deep Merge in this blog.

  • Decide if I want to render the CSS fancier than just a base file and do per-template splitting.

  • Can I use the template inside of dinky that already exists instead of copy/pasting it?
  • Is there a way to have permalinks to posts contain metadata without organizing them into subfolders?

  • How do I cachebreak files on the basis of new build events? Datetime? site.github.build_revision is how Jekyll accomplishes this, but is there a way to push that into the build process for Eleventy?

  • Make link text look less shitty. It looks like it is a whole, lighter, font.

  • Code blocks do not have good syntax highlighting. I want good syntax highlighting.

  • Build a Markdown-it plugin to take my typing shortcuts [prob, b/c, ...?] and expand them on build.

  • See if we can start Markdown's interpretation of H tags to start at 2, since H1 is always pulled from the page title metadata. If it isn't easy, I just have to change my pattern of writing in the MD documents.

  • Should I explore some shortcodes?

  • Order projects listing by last posted blog in that project

  • Limit the output of home page post lists to a specific number of posts

  • Show the latest post below the site intro on the homepage.

  • Tags pages with Pagination

  • Posts should be able to support a preview header image that can also be shown on post lists.

  • Create a Markdown-It plugin that reads the project's repo URL off the folder data file and renders commit messages with links to the referenced commit. (Is this even possible?) (Is there a way to do it with eleventy instead?)

  • Create Next Day/Previous Day links on each post / Next/Previous post on post templates from projects

  • Tags should be in the sidebar of articles and link to tag pages

  • Create a skiplink for the todo section (or would this be better served with the ToC plugin?) - Yes it would be!

  • Add a Things I Learned section to the project pages that are the things I learned from that specific project.

  • Add a technical reading log to the homepage

  • Hide empty sections.

  • Add byline to post pages

  • Have table of contents attach to sidebar bottom on mobile

  • Support dark mode

  • Social Icons

  • SEO/Social/JSON-LD HEAD data

Day 45

I want to try a way to add comments to this blog. I want something where I have a good degree of ownership over the comments, so I took a look at some options. Mainly, I'm hoping I don't have to host a server.

I took a look at a whole bunch of interesting options:

I'm going to try utterances. It's a GitHub Issues based comment system that looks like it just needs a GitHub app and some JS.

I suppose the GitHub App could break and that would screw me, but I'd still have the comments and I could always pull them in some other way if needed. The one downside is that they aren't really static in my code for this site. But let's give it a try. Staticman seems like it is closer to what I want, but I don't want to have to care for some tiny server, which seems a requirement.

Seems to work fine. I guess... I'll try it out? Sure, why not!