Comments for static sites

I would like to thank Nicolas Hoizey for introducing me to webmentions and Ryan Barrett’s Bridgy.

Glad to know that I’m not alone in thinking we netizens shouldn’t always rely on centralized internet services such as Disqus, Facebook, and even Twitter, in spite of the ease of use, we should be independent of them.

Also Chad Lee provided the perfect use of the H-Card and H-Entry for Microformats.

This all started when I was looking for a commenting system for my static blog. Most don’t like commenting through Facebook and Disqus because they are heavily moderated by parent sites - no negative comments allowed even if it’s the truth.

I’m also excited to see what my comment will look like when it comes out in Aaron Parecki’s test post.

Also another thing that I noticed, Webmention is still not popular enough for the mainstream. If you plan to comment on posts, you would likely still need to log in to your Disqus-Facebook-Wordpress commenting system. So far, the best feature of Webmention is the ability to integrate Tweets as a discussion to your post. Freek Van der Herten ingeniously instructs commenters to reply to a linked tweet to the post if they happen to discover the content via the blog. But the downside is you have to have a Twitter account.

What You Need

1. Add an H-Card to your website so you can use your social media credentials to log in to Indieweb websites.
2. Sign up to https://webmention.io/ and https://brid.gy/. Bridgy will poll all your Twitter and Instagram posts mentioning your website/blog and then it will ping Webmention in your behalf the replies you get from those sites and then Webmention.io will host all your webmentions in which you can then display in your site.
3. Install Fluffy’s https://github.com/PlaidWeb/webmention.js so that you can render the comments in your static site via javascript.
4. For commenting on Webmention-enabled sites, I like using https://telegraph.p3k.io/.

Note: I prefer using Javascript since the comments are updated in real time. For now, I’m using Fluffy’s script but maybe in the near future, I might try Vox Pelli’s endpoint.

Good Luck!