A simpler blog comment system

Since I made this blog statically-generated using Zola I've been using Remark42 as my comment system. I wanted something self-hosted and simple, and it worked.

These days I get a comment every couple of months, and about half of them are spam. Remark42 seemed to forget who I was each time, so deleting the spam involved me remembering where Remark42 was deployed, editing and re-uploading a config file each time just to become an admin user to delete the comment.

It occurred to me the other day that it would be easier if comments were just emailed to me and I could add them manually to my blog.

So this weekend I've implemented that with a simple shortcode in my Zola code, a little sprinkle of PHP, and a form at the bottom of the page that just emails me your comment. I will then check it for spam and add it to the page at my leisure.

It's simpler, and it makes clear something that was always true: comments are a part of my web site, and I curate them for relevance, spamminess and politeness.

The hardest part was extracting Remark42's boltdb database and doing some extreme jq to munge the comments into the right format. That was fun.

Feel free to comment on this page, and let me know whether it works!

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