In the twenty plus years this blog has been around, I’ve had various different comment systems. Initially, I simply stored them in a database (this blog used to be powered by ColdFusion), but eventually moved to Disqus. I had a pretty huge amount of comments and was generally OK with the service, but eventually, folks simply stopped commenting.

I then made the decision to simply kill off the integration. I wrote some scripts to get my data, stored them as flat files, and you can still see the old comments on posts that had them.

About a year or so I added in Webmentions, which works ok, but doesn’t really feel the same.

After some time thinking about it, I decided maybe its time to try again. The excellent and incredibly easy to set up Giscus uses GitHub discussions to power commenting. Now, that does mean that you need a GitHub account to comment, but with this being a very technical blog (a technical cat blog), I figured it was a safe assumption.

I’m only enabling commenting for posts from this year and forward, and if you’re curious, that code looks like so:

{% assign year = page.date | date: "%Y" %}{% if year >= 2024 %}	{% include 'giscus' %}{% endif %}

I love me some Liquid.

Anyway, leave me a comment! Say hello, introduce yourself, and so forth.

Raymond Camden