I’ve replaced my Disqus comment integration with a Mastodon-powered solution. On posts where I’ve enabled comments, you’ll now see a “Load Comments” button and a “Reply” button, both of which talk to the Mastodon API.
Adding commenting to a static site is an interesting puzzle.
This past week I started playing with GatsbyJS, a static site generator and framework centered around React.
I successfully used today it to generate a static version of this blog (I’m in the process of selecting the static site tool that will replace my vintage 2008 Django-based engine).
The componentization that React brings isn’t much of a win for me here, i.e. I’m not likely to be building components for my blog that I reuse elsewhere.
This has been going around – give people a peek at what commands you run most often. I ran this on my server, where I spend most of my shell time:
> history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s\n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
103 hg
81 cd
67 ll
29 ./manage.py
23 ab
21 re-ap
17 hgup
14 svn
13 cat
12 ls
Notes:
ab, but I’m sure it’s faster now!re-ap is my alias for restarting Apache (re-po restarts Postfix, re-my restarts MySQL, etc.).hgup is a simple shell script that updates the live instance of my site by fetching from the Mercurial repository in the staging instance. It would make a neat Django custom management command, but not one tied to a particular app.Since January 12th:
I don’t have a number for false positives, but given that I’ve received zero email complaints I’ll assume the number is low if not zero. This gives Akismet about a 98% success rate on catching spam, which is pretty good. It makes my life better. Having more spam comments than real comments get through the gates can be really depressing for a blog owner.
Other than using Akismet, the anti-comment-spam measures I have in place here are pretty primitive. I block some common patterns and blacklist some IPs. (I don’t have plans to make it any more sophisticated since I’ve told myself any new blog engineering effort needs to go to the new Django-based version, not the old PHP5 one.)
I was looking at server logs this week and noticed an unusual number of POST requests, then realized that they were foiled comment-spam attempts. I counted them up:
It’s now official: right-minded people hate those little “Blog me, digg me, add me to your feed baby!” icons attached to blog posts. References:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/93-its-the-content-not-the-icons
http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2006/10/10/mooching_20/
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000587.html
Maybe I’m part of the problem. I avoid the Nascar-style decorations, but I do have text links at the bottom of each post that cover three such sites. My links are tasteful, of course – no icons, just gray text. Faster than a bookmarklet, even, since you can use them right from the front page of the blog. But I do feel mixed about them.
Like every other web site/service/app/community/thingy that allows individual user contributions, there’s spam on Delicious too. The perp I came across today was “mcloan” – check the page out for yourself – and there are many more. Fred Stutzman has a good post on the subject, and I came across an exchange with naive Delicious spammers on Brian Dear’s weblog from last year.
But what’s Delicious/Yahoo doing about this? Where’s the Craigslist-style “flag this user as a spammer” button?