I am in the middle of moving my blog over from Blogger to self-hosting it and generating it with Pelican. One of the struggles was what to do with comments. Something like Disqus could work, but the philosophy of externally hosting comments doesn’t seem to jibe very well with the philosophy of a static website, like this one. In the end, I discovered Bernhard Scheirle’s Pelican Comment System! New comments are submitted via a mailto: link (which generates an email to me), and then each comment is stored on the backend as a separate file. The only problem left was how to import my existing comments from Blogger.

I just finished redesigning my blog and moving it from one backend provider to another. Another post will follow with the technical discussion of the steps involved, but for this post I wanted to focus on the philosophical considerations.