comment boxes

The Blaugustians are discussing comment boxes and static sites. As far as I'm aware, this is the most recent entry.

So, I have a static site, in that my site is made with a combination of HTML, CSS, and JS. It's a little different, because I built it myself, rather than relying on an external hosting service or a SSG. (More info about and a demo of my special little baby/framework is here.) I loved making it, and I still love fussing with it; in my case, it's a good chunk of the fun of having a site, so switching to a WP blog or the like is simply a non-starter for me.

I don't have the technical abilities to build a proper comments section for this site, but I didn't know JS when I started either. Learning new stuff is part of the fun. I could learn how to handle comments, if I wanted to. I have actually seriously looked into it.

The real problem is that right now, the only thing I'm paying for with this site is my domain name, which is under $20 a year. Hosting for a static site with as little traffic as I see is simply nothing.^[1] But once you start getting into the sort of data exchanges you need for comments, now you're looking at some money. I'd also need to change hosting services, which isn't insurmountable or anything but would be a pain.

So, what I have is a really janky work around. Don't get me wrong, it's genius, and I'm very grateful to the person who put in the time to come up with it (VirtualObserver), but it's genius in the manner than Rom's engineering in Deep Space Nine is genius. Rom's holding those holosuites together with a spatula,^[2] and VirtualObserver has put together a functional comments widget that runs on Google Forms. I use it for my guestbook, which is here and I get comments over there every so often.^[3]

The only reason I don't have a comment box on every page is that I didn't really think I needed one. It seems people feel strongly about it, and it's an easy change for me to make, given that I have the widget already set up. Not having a comment box is on each page is not a deeply held position on my part; it's only that it didn't really occur to me that anyone was missing it.

It must be said, though, that part of the reason it didn't occur to me that anyone was missing it was that I don't miss it terribly on other people's sites. I've had some pretty successful interactions with comments active, but I've also had some lovely ones with other static sites. It does not strike me as the biggest of deals, to be honest.