Comments are now live

Published on 2022/02/15 by vigilante sculpting

Zarjazz! Posts and projects now have a button where you can leave a comment.

All comments are sent to me via email, so you don't have to create an account or log onto anything. Plain and simple email is all it takes.

Your email address will never be shared with anyone

Your email stays safe on my email server (I am using gmail), and only the content will be published on this site, never your address.

Each post and project also has its own RSS comment feed, so if you are interested to hear what other people are saying you can add that feed to your favorite RSS reader. You get to choose for exactly how long you are notified of replies, and you'll never get hassled with emails or have to send me an unsubscribe.

So far I've tested the system and I'm confident it works, but if you run into trouble please contact me directly

But as always with great power comes great responsibility. Hence, some rules:

Rules

Since this is the internet, we have to have rules. Luckily, there are only two rules:

  1. please keep comments civil, relevant & on-topic and
  2. if in doubt, please see rule 1.
This implies that we politely discuss the post and anything relevant to it. Links and images are ok (you can add HTML), as long as they are (again) relevant & on-topic. I am likely to mark uncivil or trolling emails as spam, and I certainly won't post them. Likewise, emails that over-use HTML will be marked as spam, to preserve my sanity.

Other than that, please fire away! I'd love to hear your thoughts, comments and critiques on my works.

Details:

I got the inspiration to add an email-based commenting system to this site after reading My Cheapskate Commenting System by Bradley Taunt, and realising how easy and fuss free it can be.

Most other commenting systems require some sort of extra webservice that you have to pay for: either with money or by giving up something else (loss of freedom, privacy, and/or getting swamped with ads).

These tools, RSS & email, have been with us since the early days of the web, and they tend to work without fuss.

How it works:

The comment button opens a 'mailto' link, which tells you browser to open your default mail application with a new email addressed to me, already filled out with your comment. None of this is magic, browsers have been able to do it for a long time.

A little bit of data goes into the email subject & body, so that the information I need to put your comment in the right place is there. For example,

  • the post (or comment) that you are replying to,
  • what display name you choose, and
  • whether you want me to link to your website / URL.

Once I receive the email, I'll add the body of it to the site, withholding your email address. Then when the site is re-generated, it puts your comment in its right spot on the post.

Happy commenting!

The thumbnail for this post is Speech cloud vector created by rawpixel.com - www.freepik.com