Commento

TL;DR

Commento is good, I like it.

Long story

My personal blog is statically generated using Hugo. «Statically generated» means that all content which is needed to be loaded in your web browser is prepared beforehand and exists as a static files in some storage, accessible from the Internet. Initially, all posts are written in Markdown format. HTML files, which are loaded to the browser, are generated by Hugo from the Mardown files.

This approach helps to avoid running a live server to serve the website, but it also doesn’t allow having any kind of interaction with users. For static sites it’s not possible to have commentaries, tracking or any other kind of interaction, except when it’s implemented using JavaScript and third party services. So all the data required and produced by interaction is stored somewhere else.

Well, some kind of tracking is possible by using logs of accessing static files. However, if it’s possible — depends on a hosting provider. I use Cloudflare, which provides some statistics based on requests, and Google Analytics, which is implemented as JS script. As far as many users use tracker protection, this statistics is not complete and I’m thinking about dropping it at all.

Luckily, tracking and statistics is not so important for my personal blog. What is important — is being able to get a feedback from my readers. That’s why I also have a commentary plugin.

There are a lot of various commentary plugins: free and paid, self hosted and provided as a service. I like when things are done in a simple, efficient and secure way. That’s why I don’t use Disqus — probably, the most popular commentary plugin provider. It contains some heavy tracking scripts, features I don’t need, and it is pretty bloated in general. All this might slow down browsing experience for my readers. Apart from that, all the data is stored on someone else’s servers.

Long story short, after some research I found a really nice-looking, feature reach and lightweight plugin called Commento. It is open sourced and can be selfhosted. It’s creator also provides a hosting service for pay-what-you-want, but, as far as I have my own virtual server up and running, I decided to host Commento there. There is ready to use docker-compose file, which I transformed to use in swarm mode and with træfik as a proxy.

With this approach I’m sure that my reader’s data is kept safely and not traded out.

It should be at the bottom on each post page.

Feel free to try it out!