09 May 2022

Comments and org-static-blog

I'm using org-static-blog to generate the contents of this site. So far I'm very happy with it, but I've gotten a few emails from readers who've wanted to comment on something I've written and they always point out that it's not easy to do. It's actually not a coincidence that it's a bit difficult!

Yesterday I came up with a way that might make is slightly easier without involving JavaScript from a 3rd party. By making use of the built-in support for adding HTML code for comments. One slight limitation is that it's a single variable holding the code, and I'd really like to allow for both

using a link to a discussion site, e.g. reddit, as well as
my email address

As the comment support in org-static-blog comes in the form of a single variable this seems a bit difficult to accomplish. However, it isn't difficult at all to do in elisp due to the power of advice-add.

By using the following advice on org-static-blog-publish-file

(advice-add 'org-static-blog-publish-file :around
            (lambda (orig-fn filename &rest args)
              (let*  ((comments-url (with-temp-buffer
                                      (insert-file-contents filename)
                                      (or (cadar (org-collect-keywords '("commentsurl")))
                                          my-blog-default-comments-url)))
                      (org-static-blog-post-comments (concat "Comment <a href=" comments-url ">here</a>.")))
                (apply orig-fn filename args))))

and defining my-blog-default-comments-url to a mailto:... URL I get a link to use for commenting by either

set commentsurl to point to discussion about the post on reddit, or
not set commentsurl at all and get the mailto:... URL.

If you look at my previous post you see the result of the former, and if you look below you see the result of the latter.

Comment here.