When I started blogging 8 years ago I used WordPress. One of its features was comments. However, when I started my English blog (the one that you are reading right now) I chose Hugo and then migrated my Armenian blog to Hugo as well.
This had two amazing features. First, no more managing PHP and MySQL, since Hugo is a static sigh site generator, second, no more dealing with comments.
During the last years more and more people have been contacting me over email/Twitter/Telegram to give me feedback about a post that they read. This is mostly about my Armenian blog. I don’t get much feedback from the English blog, unless someone posts it on HackerNews (then I get A TON).
I started missing comments, a centralized place to read all the feedback and an easy way for the reader to post them.
In Hugo’s documentation I see there’s a section about comments but it recommends Disqus. I don’t like 3rd party services. Lucky someone on Twitter recommended an alternative, Isso!
Isso was very easy to deploy. I created a FreeBSD Jail, did a pip install isso and then setup a reverse proxy. Add some JS scripts here and there in the template, and it’s all done!
I’m not sure if I’ll be able to fight spam. I still need to setup an SMTP server so it emails the commenters if someone replied to their comments, but that’s a project for the weekend.
That’s all folks…