When I started using Hugu for static site generation I lost the ability to have comments and we all know now supportive the Internet can be, so why wouldn’t you have comments?
I wrote a few php scripts that I added on to Hugo and I had comments again. I decided to store the comments as flat files so I didn’t complicate things by needing the bloated MySQL. I wanted to keep it as simple and fast as possible.
When a comment is added, my PHP script created a directory (if needed) for the post and saves the comment out as a .json file with name as the current time to make sorting easy.
When the blog page was displayed, these files (already sorted thanks to the filename) were loaded and displayed.
And it all worked well until it didn’t. Flat files are simple. but they can be hard to search or maintain if they need cleaning up or dealt with after a spam attack. I figured I use commandline tools to do all of that, but it’s a lot more cumbersome than I first thought.
I missed have them in a sql database.
I didn’t want to install MySQL again, but my site doesn’t get a lot of commenting traffic so I could use Sqlite instead. The downside is Sqlite write-locks the database while a write is happening. In my case it’s a fraction of a second and wouldn’t be a issue.
The second problem I had was the version of Ubuntu my server was using is 5 years old and some of the packages I wanted wouldn’t available for it. I tried to update Ubuntu and for reasons I don’t fully understand I couldn’t.
So I spun up a new server. Since grumpygamer.com is a statics site I only had to install Apache and I was off and running. Fun times.
But the comment flat files still bugged me and I thought I’d use this as an opportunity to convert over to Sqlite. PHP/Apache comes with Sqilte already installed, so that’s easy.
A long weekend and I rewrote the code to save comments and everything is back and working.
Given that a webserver and PHP already needed to be installed, it isn’t a big deal to use Sqlite. If you’re not comfortable with SQL, it might be harder but I like SQL.
Comments:
If one doesn't like SQL but still wants an embeddedable database, I'd recommend lmdb.
It matches the simplistic design of a (file based) static website - but as you said, there are downsides and pitfalls.
In the end it feels like making tradeoffs to have this feature - but it's worth it in my opinion.
Getting feedback right at your blog posts by having something like comments or favs/likes/toots/... can be motivating to keep on writing.
I really like your games, blog and approach!
I can totally relate as to why a file based solution might be hard to maintain after those spam events, does the hcaptcha I see here help with that?
Cheers
Sven
Yeah, it basically dropped the spam to zero. A bigger problem was script kiddies trying to do I don't know what. I'd wake up to 500 messages with random stuff in them.
I hope you stay clear of those destructive SKs!
Thereās been a lot of cool stuff happening in the field of using Sqlite as your only/primary database. Datasette is a platform built on the idea of Sqlite files as reusable databases. Companies like Fly.io and CloudFlare have been promoting it as a good idea for āedgeā computing (moving things like your comments system out of the central static host to workers in a CDN). Tools like Litestream and backup options (such as live backup to an S3 bucket).
Itās neat to see all the exploration around Sqlite databases as a lightweight alternative to MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL/etc.
I used to have a comments system with a logging library. I wrote comments as INFO logs to a /comments folder. Worked nice, since there are lots of tools to query logging files.
Thereās also fastcgi for php, but I would likely just vibe-code a Go-based comment application.
I lost my passsword.
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