Blog Comments

Surprisingly, Ghost has started working better in the last few weeks. I had talked about how it was freezing, and I was thinking about finding a different platform, but now that it’s working, I think I’ll stick around for a bit.

With that being the case, I needed a new way of letting people comment on my posts. I like Disqus in theory, but they’re a privacy nightmare, and the platform isn’t open source.

So, I went hunting for something different. And it has made me question: why aren’t there any suitable options out there that are both a) easy to install and b) look good out of the box?

There are many commenting systems out there, but none really called to me or suited my needs. The few that did were either way over my head to install or have been abandoned. I thought about Fediverse commenting, but that seems overly difficult to set up as well, and I’m just good enough at this web dev shit to actually get it done.

So, I tried a couple out, but wasn’t satisfied. But then I found Comentario. It’s a system that is installed via docker, and has excellent documentation. It has a web back end that is well-designed and has loads of options.

Setting it up was effortless, I just plopped the Docker Compose file onto my home lab, and fired it up. Set up a nginx proxy and some Cloudflare protection, and then pasted the code into Ghost.

You see the results below. You can sign up for an account, which is all local, or just leave an anonymous comment. About the only thing I don’t care for is that you have to hit ‘sign in’ to get to the anonymous option. That might scare some away. I don’t know whether I’ll offer SSO or not, we’ll see how this goes. I’ll also have to set up some spam protection as well. But so far, it’s pretty great.

I don’t know whether I’ll keep it on my server or not. I may put it up on my VPS instead so that it’s not reliant on my home network. But for now, it looks nice and seems to work.

Leave me a comment below to test it out!

This is part of 30 in 30. Four more days to go.