Jekyll makes it super easy to host a static blog on github pages. It feels like a match made in heaven, as it becomes really serverless. Just write some Markdown and do a git push for publication. Everything else is nicely handled for you by Github.

The biggest downside is, being static, it obviously lacks comments. Disqus fits that gap nicely, but I don’t like to rely on another service. Besides Github issues are already implementing a comment system, so let’s reuse that.

A Simple Comment Ribbon

My first approach is to simply leverage a ribbon in the top right of every page.

pro cons
Simple to setup No visibility for comments on the blog post
No posting overhead No guidance on how to write comments

Update: I finally removed the Ribbon in favor of a simple static page.

Implementation of the Ribbon

It is very simple. It mainly consists of an include file that is injected in the default.html layout.

<div class="give-comments">
	<a class="give-comment-links" href="https://github.com/steveschnepp/blog.pwkf.org/issues">
		Comment On GitHub
	</a>
</div>

And its corresponding style. Which is included as in-line style in the same include file.

.give-comments {
	transform: rotate(90deg);

	box-shadow: 4px 3px 8px 1px #969696;
	background: #eef;
	border-radius: 5px;

	position: fixed;
	top: 6em;
	right: -4em;

	padding: 2px;
	padding-left: 10px;
	padding-right: 10px;
	text-align: right;
}

Everything is injected in _layouts/default.html layout.

(...)
<body>
	{%-  include give-comment.html -%}
	{%-  include header.html -%}

	<main class="page-content" aria-label="Content">
(...)