Adding comments to a GitHub Pages Jekyll Blog.

Comment options

After migrating my Blog over here (from the defunct IBM DeveloperWorks site), I’d been lacking Search and Comments. I use the Jekyll Minima theme, which has built-in support for Disqus comments, but when I finally decided to try that, I did a quick search on the Privacy implications (having noted that my Privacy add-ons block Disqus by default), and decided I didn’t want to use Disqus after all.

Various other options appeared in my searches, including some comparisons of them.

One of the clever, clean approaches seems to be using GitHub Issues to handle the comments. But I really didn’t want comments badly enough - at least not at this point - to do the manual work involved.

The 3 that looked most interesting to me were

You can see I chose utterances. utterances, like some of the other approaches, does require the commenter to have a GitHub account. That seems a reasonable constraint to me, and should be a SPAM deterrent as well.

utterances with Jekyll Minima

While Minima has a built-in hook for customizing your blog’s header without duplicating all the rest of, it doesn’t have one for customizing the post page. I really didn’t want to completely overwrite the post page - which would make me have to keep up with changes to it myself - but thought that might be the only option.

But it turns out that it was easy enough to pretend I was using Disqus comments:

# fake Disqus so can do utterances comments without changing base Minima post.html
disqus:
  shortname: fake_disqus_utterances

and instead override the disqus_comments.html page to contain the utterances script.