I recently decided to add commenting to the blog again because I love my dear readers so, so much. This would be simple except that my blog doesn’t have a database to store them. Tim Pease (the creator of Webby) pointed me to Disqus, a javascript-based comment system. It turns out that setting up Disqus-powered comments was a very simple and painless process that took three steps and about ten minutes. Here’s how it went down:
Sign up for a Disqus account and add your blog. Thankfully, they ask for a minimum of information up front.
Set up your blog integration. There are prebaked instructions for a number of popular blogging platforms. In my case I used the custom integration javascript snippet.
Modify the CSS to remove unwanted elements (in my case everything but the author, timestamp and text) and style the remaining elements more appropriately for your site.
The default comment styling does a good job of inheriting from your stylesheets but there are a few things you may want to change. You can see my changes at the bottom of my site.css file.
