Comments powered by Remark42

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was considering different comment engines/ platforms, so people can login with Twitter, Facebook, Google, or whatever and leave comments.

I evaluated a few options and I have decided to use Remark42.
I chose it because it seems the most solid and featureful platform, from the options I checked. But I’ll keep an eye on the other candidates too, in the future.

So my blog has 2 types of comments now:

1. IndieWeb comments, collected from other websites, or different social media
2. Remark42 comments

I’m thinking I need 2 types of comments because it’s more natural for people to comment at the bottom of a page, in the same place as the actual blog post. And my implementation of IndieWeb comments is not yet finished on the website.

Installing Remark42 was pretty straightforward. I bought a VPS from Hetzner, I installed Docker, cloned the Remark42 repo and ran docker-compose up -d.
The most “complicated” thing was to get the tokens for Github, Twitter and Google. Especially Google is always a pain in the ass to navigate their endless maze of GCP pages and options.

First time I tried to use their built-in implementation for HTTPS server, but there might be some bugs, or the documentation is not clear how to use. And it wasn’t such a good idea to expose their service directly on the web anyway.

So I’m using Caddy with automatic HTTPS. It was as simple as:

comment.crlf.site:443/* {
	reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8000
}

To inject the client script on the website, I used the Remark42 readme again and it worked perfectly.
You can see the new comment section just below this text.

I’m really happy with it so far. Of course there are no comments yet, as I’m writing the article.
Don’t be shy, leave your comments below :D