Staticman comments

Well, when I started with Jekyll to create my blog, one of the contributing factors in so choosing was the comment system. Staticman, notably, allows comments to be made which are actually PR merge requests in the blog site repo. The whole blog is still static and integrated in github as backend.

I thought enabling staticman would be really easy… unfortunately, not so. As starter, it actually needs a service which handles the http GET and POST requests which then are turned into a PR request. Since the public service is saturated, I had to deploy an instance for my blog. Which means, forking the staticman repo, opening an heroku account to run that service which, incidentally is a… node.js daemon. Grr. Gotta hate this web JS shit. I will never understand why an untyped language with like 3 different equality operators and none of the good stuff promoting solid and bug-free engineering got so popular. Come on, the computer is supposed to do the work for you and tell the developer when his code is going to hell, not go “oh this seems ambiguous, but I will just smartly typecast and infer what the dev probably meant and throw a real wacky hard to find bug. Which could have been found at compile time, but nooo… I shall let you find it at runtime. Oh, yeah, because of “Web developers”. You don’t agree ? Oh, I can see that. Bite me. Go read the ADA DOD spec and cry about why missiles, mission and life critical devices do not run on Javascript.

Anyway, it was quite a journey to get staticman working between RSA certificates, multiple accounts, extra git repositories, and layer after layer of configuration all over the place. Seems that anyone who creates a blog with Jekyll painfully gives birth to a gigantic blog post about it, so I am not going to repeat this. However, for your edification and to be able to refresh my failing memory, I will link to all the posts and web pages which helped me get this working. Although there is still one piece that is not working: the github webhook. Whenever the webhook is invoked by github when a PR is created, the staticman service croaks with an error. Too bad, I just disabled this in the end as everything else is working ok. I still get the email notifications so I really do not care about the webhook.

In the end, I got everything I wanted working: comments on my blog posts, akismet for anti-spam, and google analytics (to know if anyone is reading…)

As reference:

• https://www.mrumpler.at/comments-with-staticman/
• https://knightcodes.com/miscellaneous/2016/09/13/fix-github-metadata-error.html
• https://github.com/mmistakes/minimal-mistakes/issues/1544
• https://www.mrumpler.at/comments-with-staticman/
• https://hajekj.net/2020/04/15/staticman-setup-in-app-service/
• https://spinningnumbers.org/a/staticman-heroku.html#webhook
• https://github.com/eduardoboucas/staticman/issues/389
• https://github.com/eduardoboucas/staticman/issues/83
• https://github.com/mmistakes/minimal-mistakes/issues/1674#issuecomment-511945391