Finally, a proper comments system
Okay, I admit it, having a mailto link at the bottom of each post is not an ingenious comments system.
Iâve added Giscus to this blog: now, under each blog post, youâll find a discussion section where you can react and comment, and comments there will be visible publicly.
Iâd been considering adding a proper, public comments system for a while.
For all my gripes with PHP, I loved how the PHP docs allowed users to comment on any page. The gotchas and additional examples that users would post were super helpful.
And Iâve generally found blogs that didnât have public comments to be less credible than sources where the community can weigh in. This philosophy is why even in the age of ChatGPT, I still primarily rely on StackOverflow to get answers to my programming questions. The idea that wrong and poor quality answers will be caught by the community lends much more confidence to sources that have comments and voting.
Finally, Giscus had been on my radar for a while. One of the reasons I switched to a grotesque sans-serif font for the body text of this site, actually, was so that a GitHub-themed comments section would not look out of place.
So why put it off for so long? I guess I was clinging to the idea of a âtimeproofâ website: one with all its data self-contained in the repo, not relying on anything that could be lost when migrating platforms.
I eventually decided that having a public comments system outweighs this. I can figure out how to migrate things when I need to.
Recently, I read Jeff Atwoodâs post, A Blog Without Comments Is Not a Blog.
If thatâs true, then cheers to this blog finally becoming a blog!