Entries tagged disqus

Last night I was up again, really hard to sleep when you have a bad cold.

I decided to do something fun, and allow my tweaking guide to accept comments.

Like many of my sites this is 100% static, and generated by templer, so comments are "hard".

I've seen a few people try to rewrite disqus as a general-purpose solution, and I like that idea, because I don't trust that particular service.

I wasn't so ambitious though, I just hacked up a quick sinatra server:

• "GET /comments/ID"
  • Retrieves the comments on the specified identifier as a JSON array of comment-hashes.
• "POST /comments/ID"
  • Append the submitted comment to a redis set.

My jquery/javascript is nasty, but the thing seems to work pretty well. The page loads and comments are populated, and new ones are persisted as expected.

I can see the appeal of putting all this magic in one javascript file. You include that and get both the existing comments and the form to add new ones - my approach is to hardwire the submission/display in my generated site.

Perhaps something for the future.

In conclusion if people wish they can now leave feedback on most of the pages :)

Tags: disqus, javascript | 9 comments

The simple external-comments code is now complete enough for me to stop poking it on a daily basis:

• Although the comments are styled minimally you can override that with CSS.
• Although the default "Add your reply" form is ugly you can replace it with your own.
  • The reply-form may go above or below the comments.
• If you add an email field then your comments will include a gravitar link.
• Comments are assumed to be in markdown now.
• The commments may be retrieved in newest-first, or oldest-first order.
• There's now a simple anti-spam plugin system present.

All in all I'm pretty happy with the way it works, and the server-code. The client-side Javascript is less good, but I'm probably done poking that too.

In an ideal world the client-side code should be a jQuery plugin, but I've not worked out how to make a static method (the JSONP callback) be a member of a jQuery plugin-object. So without that I have to re-pass the options around too many places, rather than making them a member of "this".

Meh, pull requests welcome for adding new storage back-ends (redis and sqlite are supported by default), and similarly for cleanups.

Links:

• https://github.com/skx/e-comments
• Simple demo & Customized demo.

Tags: disqus, e-comments, javascript | No comments