Now with native comments

Since last year this blog is powered by the Ghost open source blogging platform. Two important and long-standing shortcomings of the platform were search and comments, which I added via integrating third-party tools (Typesense and Discourse, respectively).

In the last several weeks Ghost team has worked hard to add these features to the core platform, described here and here. These changes do not (yet) work well via the Ghost API, so I decided to drop my Jamstack setup with Ghost as a headless CMS backend and a frontend built with Next.js. Native comments and search are available now, more work is needed to register and display DOIs for the blog posts, based on schema.org metadata (which need minor tweaks, e.g. include the license of the blog content), and a Github Actions workflow.

To use the new comments, you have to sign up as a Front Matter Blog member (signup links at the top and bottom of every page). Front Matter membership is free, is needed for commenting to control spam, and optionally includes a newsletter (each new blog post sent via email).

Of course, I am well aware that comments are not a technical problem, but a social problem. But building a community around the Front Matter blog is easier if commenting is easy and doesn't require signing up to an external service with unknown policies around handling personal data.