Given all of the options I’ve explored have some trade-offs, I eventually landed on giscus. It’s pretty simple to set up and uses GitHub Discussions, which seems like a reasonable place for comment threads to go. It does require commenters to have a GitHub account, which is something I wanted to avoid, but this should help combat spam to some degree and at this time is an acceptable trade-off for me. There’s also an option to self-host which I will likely explore in the future.
If you use Minimal Mistakes theme, the setup for all of these commenting systems is quite easy. To get started with giscus on Minimal Mistakes, see their docs on the subject. If you use another theme don’t worry, it’s still pretty simple to get started by following the official giscus docs.
If there are other approaches for commenting on static sites you like that I didn’t cover, let me know in the comments!
]]>This time around I’ve gone with a simplified setup using the Minimal Mistakes template repo. My hope is that by migrating to this template I can merge in any upkeep tasks and changes from that template and focus primarily on content rather than churn maintaining the site itself. GitHub Pages has proved very reliable in the past for hosting simple sites like this.
Publishing new articles is extremely easy with this setup. All you need to do is create a new markdown document in the _posts directory and on push this article gets automatically deployed by a GitHub Actions workflow which you can see here. For example, see the source for this article.
If you’re interested in hosting a similar website yourself it’s quite easy. Check out the GitHub Pages docs for a quick start. There’s a ton of available open source templates to get you started or you can create a Jekyll site yourself from scratch.
I’m hoping to publish more posts this time around, especially as I rebuild my home server and network and dive deeper into cybersecurity topics. If you want to subscribe for future updates, the site is also published as an RSS feed here.
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