Let there be comments

What is a blog without comments? An article with no feedback.

Half of blogging charm comes from a live discussion in comments. Community, feedback, ideas, linkbacks - all of that depends on comments.

So, let there be comments!

Comment providers for GitHub Pages blogs

Comment providers are off-the-shelf products nowadays. Discourse, Disqus, Facebook, you name it. Plug some JS on a page and it’s good to go.

True to my engineering roots, I want to use utterance for the comments. Reasons are self-evident:

• Lightweight
• No tracking, no ads, no nonsense
• Powered by GitHub issues

And the most important…

• Easy to enable in the theme Minimal Mistakes

How to enable utterances comments on GitHub Pages blog?

It’s as easy as 2 minimal updates to _config.yml

First, enable comments with Front Matter variable:

defaults:
  - scope:
      path: ""
      type: posts
    values:
      comments: true

Then configure provider and utterance settings:

comments:
  provider: "utterances"
  utterances:
    theme: "github-light" # "github-dark"
    issue_term: "pathname"
    label: "comment" # Optional - must be existing label.

That’s it! Can’t be easier than that.

Downsides

Of course, there are tradeoffs, as with everything in software engineering.

The theme Minimal Mistakes does not render comments by default in development mode, i.e., running locally with bundle exec jekyll serve command.

Minimal Mistakes comments config page recommends to set environment variable JEKYLL_ENV=production to run in production mode.

Another downside is that utterances GitHub login widget redirects to url set in _config.yml. I have to set it to http://localhost:4000 to allow GitHub to redirect back to local Jekyll web service.

All in all, it’s no big deal. I’m totally happy with the trade-offs. I can have a lively discussions under my posts.

Happy comments!