Meg in Progress

I wanted to add a comments section to entries. I really didn't want to put much effort into this…just a simple box to respond to posts. It turned out that utterances provided me with something that was easy to set up and visually appealing. The only issue is that in order to comment, you have to be signed in to github. Since my site is hosted on github pages, though, this seems like an okay compromise.

I chose utterances because each comment section will be self-hosted on this site's repo, it was simple to set up, and while people have to log in to leave comments, I preferred that to allowing "guest" comments. Since internet comment sections have a reputation for being toxic hell-scapes, I wanted to ensure commenters have a stake in what they say. As much as I am an advocate for free speech, I don't want to provide a platform where people are enabled to evade responsibility for what they say. -- mode: org; -- Facebook comments was out because I am not going to force people to use their real names to comment. Disqus would be the obvious choice, or any number of third-party systems. I wasn't inclined to go down that road, mostly because of privacy issues. I don't want data gathered from user comments on my site to be sold by a third party to advertisers. If I expect commenters on my posts to take responsibility for their words, I have a responsibility to ensure an open discussion forum doesn't turn into a for-profit opportunity for anonymous corporations.

It was incredibly easy to set up. All it involved was to install the utterances app on my blog repo, then paste a code snippet to my post template. If you'll recall, I am using YASnippet as a templating tool for my blog posts. That said, I didn't add the code directly into my post snippet. Instead I added a new directory, ~/org/src/ where I created an utterances.html file with the code in question. Then I simply included the file in my snippet to be exported as html:

#+INCLUDE: "../src/utterances.html" export html

Another change I made I started to touch on in my last post, and that has to do with my yasnippet "snippets". I mentioned that including actual code within my ya-snippet file created an issue if I were to make changes to my blog template after the fact. Because of this, I decided to completely revamp my post snippet so that the build of each post is made mostly from external files. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

#+SETUPFILE: ../org-templates/level-1.org
#+INCLUDE: "./src/header.html" export html

#+TITLE: ${1:Title}
#+CATEGORY: ${2:Category}
#+DATE: `(current-time-string)`
#+FILENAME: ${3:filename}

=* $1=

#+INCLUDE: "../../content/$3.org"

#+INCLUDE: "../src/utterances.html" export html

Notice that, in addition to the SETUPFILE, I have added three different INCLUDE files to export as blocks.

header.html

previously this was part of an export block included directly in the snippet. The code hasn't changed; it's just housed elsewhere.

/content/ directory

this was the solution to my date problem that I mentioned in my previous entry. Basically, posts should be dated according to when they were published, not when I started writing them. One solution would be to use the org exporter's {{{DATE}}} macro, which assigns a date when the file is exported, but I wanted to ensure the date wouldn't change if I needed to republish a file for any reason. So, I decided the best thing to do would be to house the actual blog content in a separate file, to be included in the post file, so the date would only be calculated when the snippet was inserted into the post. The idea is to only create a post for export when it is ready to be published.

utterances.html

I explained this above.

As I said in my last post, this blog is, and will continue to be, a work in progress. Still, I probably won't go over every single change or update I make to the configuration and templating system in the future. Instead, I'll focus on figuring out what kind of content to put on here. I'm barely a programmer or developer – I would call myself a creative, and the purpose of this blog is to share some of my story and my process with the world. Stay tuned!

Tagged: dev