Giscus Is Awesome

14 September 2023 1 Minute History Tooling Blogging

I can add comments to my statically generated blog? Using GitHub Discussions?? For Free??? And it works????

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giscus.app is really awesome!

Last week I posted for the first time in six years and I figured I wanted to see about adding comments to this site. A Google search got me to Giscus really quick, and I was able to wire it up in just ten minutes. The thing that's still blowing my mind is that it works.

Behind the scenes, it syncs up with the GitHub Discussions tab on the repo that hosts this website, and it matches a discussion to a page based on the the page's title.

When somebody adds the first comment to a page, it creates a corresponding discussion thread for the page. When a page loads, it checks to see if there is a corresponding discussion and it loads the conversations from that discussion thread.

I can do comment moderation and whatnot on GitHub discussions, and if somebody stumbles upon my website on GitHub they can see the conversation right there. If the tool stops working, the conversations still exist in GitHub, living right alongside the source for this site.

And - I can't emphasis this enough - it just works. I see so few tools that just work and this one does.

Check it out!

Hi, I'm Ian

I'm a software engineer, architect, and team leader in Minneapolis. My career has largely focused on .NET and web technologies, spread across several industries. Currently I'm working for Crate & Barrel on their ecommerce solutions. You can find me on this blog, contributing to open source repositories, and at conferences around the Midwest.


If you'd like to keep up with me, please subscribe to my book club or RSS feed. If you'd like to help me out with server costs, I would be forever grateful if you bought me a coffee!


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