Cloudsourcing comments with Disqus
While tinkering around with a "semi-static" architecture for makeblog in an effort to support commenting, I discovered Disqus, a cloud-based commenting system. This was the perfect complement to my static HTML-based makeblog, and I have now enabled it on all the posts on this site. One great thing about using a cloud-based service like Disqus is that you get separation between publishing and commenting. makeblog is at its core a publishing system--you write posts, it turns them (publishes them) into nice-looking static HTML pages which you can serve on the Internet, put in a zipfile, whatever you want. Makeblog is structured to let you keep your posts, drafts, and other publishing-related data on disk, so you can keep it in version control. I was exploring a text format for comments on disk, but having that really wreaks havoc with the nice, simple version-controlled posts concept. Instead, using Disqus presents a very nice modular solution to the problem. Now, if only we could integrate other services as easily into our blogs, like photo galleries...
By the way: this doesn't mean I'm giving up on the dynamic aspect of makeblog entirely. I will be releasing a "light" commenting system in makeblog using Flask soon.