Fremantle
· indieweb · comments · Mastodon ·
Comments by Kris, 9 Feruary 2025:
I’ve deliberately left comments turned off for now, as Rodd is working on a project to turn this blog (and RoaldDahlFans) into a static site. This will make the site more secure; it’ll load faster for you; and it’ll be cheaper for me to run. The trade-off is that anything interactive – like comment forms – won’t work anymore. But I know what Emily means, and I miss having that form of interactivity here.
There is an interesting option that I’m toying with – using Bluesky and/or Mastodon for the comments. I’ve seen several static blogs doing this with those networks, and it feels like something I could do. I’ve started doing my research so it may well be appearing here before you know it…
This does sound like a good idea. It makes it possible for people to comment on a post, but not have to register a local account at all. (Like how it'd work if we all used webmentions?) A common approach seems to be to firstly publish the blog post (so that it has a URL), and then post about the post on Mastodon, and then either use the ID of that latter post or a search for the former post's URL (in one's own Mastodon posts) to find the Mastodon post. Once a relevant Mastodon post or posts has been found, retrieve any replies and show them on the blog post.
I might have to give it a go here (although where 'here' will be by the time you read this I don't know, but I think I want to nuke my site and do something different… not that I'm dissatisfied with MediaWiki as a blogging system…).
The other thing I want to use static-site comments for is on genealogy and archives' sites, where it'd be great to be able to get feedback on biographies or catalogue entries etc.