4 ms·

I agree that getting things like comments and search running on a static site is a lot work. But I’m of the opinion your personal site doesn’t need those things

I agree that getting things like comments and search running on a static site is a lot work. But I’m of the opinion your personal site doesn’t need those things. Rarely have I seen interesting discussion happen in the comments of a personal blog. All great discussion is held in aggregators like HN. Similarly search is best left to specialized platforms such as a search engine. Blogging software may have decent search by why recreate a search engine when duckduckgo.com will far exceed capabilities with site: and filetype:? For me a personal site and blog are mostly single visit kind of stops. I end up on a blog via a link but almost never do I feel the need to read the top 5 best posts of some blog. I got some interesting information from the current article but then I’m of to the next link that shows up in my feed. In my opinion a website needs readability[0] and an ATOM/RSS feed. All the rest is part ego ("my content is so great people just have to see what else I wrote") and part feature creep. [0] https://www.sinax.be/blog/general/guidelines-for-spartan-webdesign.html https://www.sinax.be/blog/general/guidelines-for-spartan-web...

tehlike 7y ago
Except if you are ayende.com/blog
bishalb 7y ago
Sure, for a personal site or a portfolio site, they are not even needed. I also use Hugo for one of my sites, which is just a 5 page website. It is great for such stuff. But for a personal blog, I think both of those things(commenting and search) are absolutely essential. >Rarely have I seen interesting discussion happen in the comments of a personal blog. I disagree with this and even more so if we are talking about programming blogs. A lot of interesting discussions and rebuttals happen in the comment sections. Regarding outsourcing search to a dedicated search engine, its a mixed bag. 99% of the users don't even know about the `site:` and `filetype:` stuff. You also have the option of embedding Google site search but the first four results are ads which isn't very ideal. Wordpress search is decent out of the box but if you want something advanced, it has some nice plugins that allow advanced searching with fuzzy matches.
- majewsky 7y ago
  > But for a personal blog, I think both of those things(commenting and search) are absolutely essential. What I've found to work well for commenting is to put an e-mail address on the page where people can send their comments. When there is a good comment, I put an update in the article. The main advantage of this approach is that it weeds out garbage responses. By making it ever so slightly harder for people to post a comment, they are forced to take an extra few seconds to consider if they really have something meaningful to add.
  - bishalb 7y ago
    That is a good idea but would people really want to leave the site to open their email client and make a comment? I had once thought about a different approach - Creating a Google form (for each blog post) and then embedding it on the blog post. Then whenever anyone submits a comment via the form, it would get saved to a Google spreadsheet(this needs to be made publicly readable). The unwanted comments can just be deleted from the spreadsheet. The contents of this spreadsheet can then be obtained in a JSON format and displayed on the blog post using Javascript.
    - pier25 7y ago
      Or you can just post the blog post to Reddit/HN with a link to those at the end of the article and let your readers comment there.
      - bishalb 7y ago
        Yes but again, I prefer not to offload commenting to a third party because they can ban you(reddit can ban your subreddit) or just stop their service(Google Plus comments). If I am to use Reddit, I might as well just use Disqus or Facebook comments that I can embed on the site and my visitors won't even have to leave the site to comment on a post.
        KajMagnus 7y ago

tehlike 7y ago

Except if you are ayende.com/blog

bishalb 7y ago

Sure, for a personal site or a portfolio site, they are not even needed. I also use Hugo for one of my sites, which is just a 5 page website. It is great for such stuff. But for a personal blog, I think both of those things(commenting and search) are absolutely essential. >Rarely have I seen interesting discussion happen in the comments of a personal blog. I disagree with this and even more so if we are talking about programming blogs. A lot of interesting discussions and rebuttals happen in the comment sections. Regarding outsourcing search to a dedicated search engine, its a mixed bag. 99% of the users don't even know about the `site:` and `filetype:` stuff. You also have the option of embedding Google site search but the first four results are ads which isn't very ideal. Wordpress search is decent out of the box but if you want something advanced, it has some nice plugins that allow advanced searching with fuzzy matches.

majewsky 7y ago
> But for a personal blog, I think both of those things(commenting and search) are absolutely essential. What I've found to work well for commenting is to put an e-mail address on the page where people can send their comments. When there is a good comment, I put an update in the article. The main advantage of this approach is that it weeds out garbage responses. By making it ever so slightly harder for people to post a comment, they are forced to take an extra few seconds to consider if they really have something meaningful to add.
- bishalb 7y ago
  That is a good idea but would people really want to leave the site to open their email client and make a comment? I had once thought about a different approach - Creating a Google form (for each blog post) and then embedding it on the blog post. Then whenever anyone submits a comment via the form, it would get saved to a Google spreadsheet(this needs to be made publicly readable). The unwanted comments can just be deleted from the spreadsheet. The contents of this spreadsheet can then be obtained in a JSON format and displayed on the blog post using Javascript.
  - pier25 7y ago
    Or you can just post the blog post to Reddit/HN with a link to those at the end of the article and let your readers comment there.
    - bishalb 7y ago
      Yes but again, I prefer not to offload commenting to a third party because they can ban you(reddit can ban your subreddit) or just stop their service(Google Plus comments). If I am to use Reddit, I might as well just use Disqus or Facebook comments that I can embed on the site and my visitors won't even have to leave the site to comment on a post.
      - KajMagnus 7y ago