I like to keep my site as simple as possible. Sometimes though, I feel like a comment section would be useful incase someone wants to ask a question on a blog post or leave some constructive criticism. On the other hand, I dislike the idea of having to use third party commenting systems like disqus. I also think implementing my own commenting system and requiring users to provide an email or something to comment is a bit overkill. This is the option I would go with though if I was to do it.
Does your site have a comments section? Do you think it's necessary?
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I recently decided to add comments to my blog, having not had them for a long time.
I haven't had any spam yet and I have had some nice comments.
I wrote about it: robinwinslow.uk/i-now-support-comm...
There are more privacy focused alternatives to disqus (eg commento.io/) that might be an option.
Personally what I've been doing recently is to republish my articles on eg dev.to, and then linking to the comments there. It works nicely since then you have the primary source of content on your blog, but the comments are where the community is.
Eg: (see the bottom of the post) loftie.com/post/things-you-may-not...
That's a great idea. Does the like count increment automatically based on the likes on Dev.to?
Yup it uses the dev.to api to periodically refresh the likes
Awesome 👍🏽
I think having a "Discuss on Twitter" link like Dan has on his blog is also a great idea.
Agreed. If I'd setup a blog I would have encourage people to have the conversation on platforms where they hang out, so DEV and Twitter
For me it hasn't been worth it. Right now I use disqus and even then I haven't gotten a single comment. It may be because a lot of my content speaks for itself, or perhaps my blog just isn't popular enough.
I use third-party blogging platforms (e.g. Blogger/BlogSpot) for both personal and technical blogs. Spammers are such a problem (seriously: I don't care how much BlueHost is paying you to crap-up randos' comments-sections, that you're crapping up my blog means I will never use their service) that I pretty much either wholly disable comments or I set them to be 100% "review before making visible".
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Amazing. You know, I just might use this.
If you do decide to get a comment section, one way to ease the login/signup for them is to use social login from GitHub/Twitter.
You can also create some way for the posts to link to the article on twitter, i.e. a hashtag with the slug or something. Give them a big button to hit that sets up the template though.
How else is my mum going to tell me how lovely my latest blog is?
She can always share your posts on twitter to show her support 😄
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