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.
I migrated my blog from a Django system I wrote 12 years ago, to a static site generated via Hugo.
The move wasn’t just about getting out of an old codebase — it also was the result of seeing how static generation is a very reasonable fit for most blog sites (including mine). Dynamically generating the pages is really just one way to get the raw content rendered into my preferred form and interface. Static generation does that too.
During the 40 months or so of this blog’s life I’ve worked to keep it focused on my technical and professional interests, not personal stories. That means that you are conveniently spared having to read the story behind the lack of posts here since late May. Summary: Things were bad, but are much better now.
So I’m now back in action, and sporadic posts should be forthcoming without another four-month wait. For those waiting on the book, rest assured that it’s well under control, and closer than ever to being in your hands. Final details to come. But soon you’ll be able to buy it, carry it to the cafe, and put it out on your table next to your laptop as a sign of your great savvy.
I’m doing a small experiment in open source distribution.
I have a site, toolbot.com, which formerly was a collection of miscellaneous PHP scripts that I had assembled over the years for specific tasks – package tracking, dummy text generation, link shortening, etc. Those tools are now offline. The original cause of their disappearance was a MySQL failure, but that really just provided an opportunity for me to make a break with that pile of old code.
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.
I launched this blog in July of 2005. It was powered by a homebrew PHP5 creation that as of today has, finally, thankfully, been laid to rest.
The other thing that started absorbing my attention in July 2005 was Django. Every month since then, I’ve thought, “You know, I should make some time this weekend to port my blog over to Django.” I was using it for everything else, after all, side projects as well as web applications at work. The word “port” was the mistake there – if I had said, “I should make some time this weekend to destroy my old blog and make a clean-slate Django version”, I probably would have gotten it done about two years ago!
Damned spammers. Looks like a big batch of drug-spam just went out with my personal email forged as the sender. The number of backscatter messages I’ve gotten today exceeds the number of spams that usually make it through to me in a week. Why? Because my anti-spam measures are mostly about blocking messages from “bad” mail servers, and backscatter comes from “good” mail servers.
I’m laying a lot of ironic emphasis on those quotes around “good” because I shouldn’t be getting those backscatter messages at all. They piss me off – at the spammers, of course, but also at the people who run the mail servers which are helpfully “returning” mail to me that I did not send. In a more idealistic time I might have suggested that they could have avoided this by using SPF (which is true), but this is an even more basic competence issue. To quote from the above linked page: