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Back when I started this blog, which is not too long ago to be honest. I had no intention on adding comments, And the guide on how to make a static site[1] I followed (made by Kev[2]!), did not include that. In fact, the code snippet shared in said guide for the post layout had the following message:
I don't have comments on this site as they're difficult to manage and take up too much time. I'd rather concentrate on producing content than managing comments.
Instead of leaving a comment, feel free to contact me ✉️ instead.
And yeah, I was happy with that, but after sharing my blog in a Discord server where I talk to some friends, they kept demanding comments, not in a serious way, but just to troll me and annoy me (At least that's what I hope lol).
But after that, one of them sent me a link to a guide on how to do comments[3] using GitHub issues API (so yeah, you will need to have one if you want to comment here, but at least it serves as a way to not have absolutely everyone doing so, limiting a bit).
And so, I decided to give it a try. I have to admit I just copy pasted everything in it at first, but after doing so, I realized that it had some conflicts with the Simple.css[4] framework, which I used to make this site look as it does. The profile pictures looked huge, and the formatting was all wrong, so I did not like the look of it. I decided to keep working on it. To fix the avatar pictures, I added this to my custom.css file:
.avatar{
opacity: 0.9;
width: 2.5rem;
border-radius: 30%;
padding: 2px 2px;
}
Where the `avatar` class is included inside of the comments.html file that I took from the guide, as well as other classes that I had to customize myself so they don't use the default properties provided by simple.css. Said classes are here:
.comment-url{
line-height: 1px;
font-size: 0.7rem;
color: var(--border);
}
.comment-content{
text-decoration: none;
margin: 0 1rem ;
padding: 0.15rem;
font-size: 0.9rem;
border-radius: 5px;
line-height: var(--line-height);
background: var(--code-bg);
}
Markdown can be used inside of comments too, so you can have headers, lists, and everything markdown can (I think). This meant that I had to limit and change letter sizes of them, so more CSS needed to be done. At the beginning I had no idea of how to do it, but after reading the simple.css file, I realized how some of the syntax worked. *After some attempts because I forget semi-colons exist and had to test different values*, it worked! So this is a snippet of how I limited the image file size first.
.comment-content img{
margin-left: 2rem;
border-radius: 5px;
max-width: 40%;
}
So I did the same thing for the headers, and quotes, and everything that came to mind. In the end, comments were looking kinda nice, with a decent looking layout.
Despite what my description said, I think there might still be something you can break on this approach, but well, please don't. If you want to take a look at the source code[5] of this blog, feel free to do so, since I changed it quite a bit from the original.
So this was everything I did to add comments to my site. Once again, huge thanks to Aristath[6], for sharing quite a great resource, and Abhinav[7], who let me know of it.
This was day 7 of #100DaystoOffload[8], and I am quite happy with the final results. Let me know what do you think in the comments! (I was eager to write that, and I hope you can stop whining about this marrero171[9])
1: https://kevq.uk/how-to-build-jekyll-site-simple-css/
3: https://aristath.github.io/blog/static-site-comments-using-github-issues-api
5: https://github.com/joelchrono12/jekyll-site-test.css
6: https://aristath.github.io/
7: https://distrotoot.com/@abhi