Bluesky comments on this MiniBlog

On my other blogs I self-host isso to handle user comments.

Over here on this MiniBlog with its lower effort MiniPosts, I did want comments, but I wanted lower effort (see above), plus that I’ve always wanted to try out the Bluesky-replies-as-comments approach, and so here we are!

After some searching this morning, I selected Kaushik Gopal’s solution from a collection of Hugo+Bluesky efforts, because it was both 1. available and 2. very to the point.

After converting the comments-bsky.html partial to bootstrap 4, because that’s what the super simple theme here uses, and ever-so-slightly tweaking the comments-bsky.js javascript, I could add the pre-requisite {{- partial "comments-bsky.html" . -}} to the post/single.html layout, and we were off to the races.

(Before leaving for the aforementioned races, I did lose about half an hour to debugging the CORS error I was getting on hovering over the Bluesky avatars in the comments. This was baffling, because the initial load was fine. It turns out the iCloud Passwords Chrome extension reloads all images on hover to check for QRCodes grumble grumble. In retrospect, I took far too long to check the originator column in the dev tools network panel.)

So now, if I want to enable comments for a post, I make an accompanying Bluesky post and then install its URL as the bsky: post parameter in the markdown source, and then (re-)publish the post. You should see the comments (or utter lack of) list right below this text.