Hugo with comments

So, I made this blog to write again, and chose to use Hugo . And while Hugo is amazing, it's a static site. And while I can add comments to my site using services like Disqus, I sort of wanted to roll my own comment service. So here it is! Below this post, you can comment.

I wrote a simple API server that has only two actions:

1. Get a list of comments
2. Post a comment

The server is written in Go (obviously). It stores its data in Redis. To (hopefully) reduce the amount of spam, I can manually approve all comments, and I run new comments through Akismet to auto-approve them if Akismet doesn't think they're spam.

The code for this comment server is on github at Luit/comments , and if you want to try it, you can install it by doing:

go get luit.eu/comments

Running it is as simple as … well … just running it. Make sure you have a Redis server running at the default Redis port (with no password). If you want the Akismet support to work you'll have to pass an AKISMET_KEY environment variable. By default it'll run listening on 127.0.0.1:2668.

Using it from a blogpost requires two additions to your template:

1. a <script> that'll request the list of comments
2. a <form> that posts to the comment server

This page has both, so look at the source here to see an example. (warning: I am a horrible client-side programmer)