Hello World of 2022

Happy New Year!

For whatever reason,¹ I saw this post from @dsyates about using Mastodon to add comment functionality to a “static” blog. This is a feature that I was looking for a long time. However, when I searched for a solution, I could not find a straightforward way to integrate this feature without non-FOSS third-party tools.

But, the idea to use Mastodon makes it a funny workflow. To get comments, you need a Mastodon account and a toot about your post. Each message on Mastodon has a unique ID that you can link to it. Integrate it with your blogpost in order to collect the comments on the page of your post. You will need some templating, CSS, and Javascript, but @tcheneau has a good step by step post about it (thanks!).

I found it very attractive, because that is encouraging me to use Mastodon and connect with a new community, now I am here: @nehemie!

To conclude, as @dsyates puts it:

This blog post is really just a test to try out as implemented and explained by @carl: in this blogpost on a Hugo static site; as well as by @xosem: in this blogpost on a Jekyll static site.

Addendum (2022-02-01)

I was playing with the Mastodon platform, and in my preferences, I went to “Automated post deletion” and selected “Automatically delete old posts” after a threshold of two weeks. I like hiking and one of the moto is “leave no trace”. I thought that it was clever to select it (for privacy), and that it would free space on the server (saving energy). However, I did not realise that it would delete my tooth about my blogpost that is referenced as ID! Therefore, I succeeded in deleting the first comments on my blog (I am sorry about that). So if you add comment via Mastodon, either do not auto-delete your post, or make sure to activate an option to avoid this (such as bookmarking to prevent deletion).

References