A New Approach To Comments

Back when I first started thinking about statically generating my blog, one of the big questions I had was, "What to do with comments?" A pure static site has nowhere to store responses after the pages are generated. Disqus is a popular system that uses Javascript to store comment posted from here in their backend and dynamically render them in a div here. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to reconsider the conventional approach to comments.

Some of the most popular bloggers out argue that a blog without comments is not a blog. I realy do appreciate the points they make about two-way communication. However, I never liked being responsible for content on my blog that I did not put there.

So in the chaos of dealing with my site being hacked I made the decision to finally leave comments behind. The comment form below now sends me an email. If you want your comment to be publicly visible, I encourage you to start a blog or a tumblr or public social profile (on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc). There are a lot of options available today.

I don't have trackbacks working here yet so if you want to ensure I see your feedback, please drop me comment with a link. A little bit ago someone left me this comment:

I'd leave a comment... but I'm not sure you'd read it?

I assure you that I read all comments. I also try to respond to most comments. In many cases, I plan to respond via a future blog post and it just takes a while for me to work through the queue.

So that's my new approach to comments. Maybe one day I'll reconsider Disqus or some other commenting system. Until then, keep coding. You know I am.