This post describes a simply method to link back from your static block page to Mastodon, so that people can eventually reply.
Today I stumbled about Carl Schwan’s article Adding comments to your static blog with Mastodon. I liked the idea in general, but I wanted it much simpler.
Specify mastodon host
First, I don’t want to specify my maston host into every host. So this ends up in the Params: section
of my config.yaml:
params:
...
mastodon: "https://emacs.ch/@holgerschurig"
One can access this then as `{{ .Site.Params }}`` in Hugo templates.
Mastodon toot ID
When I toot about one of my blog posts, the post will get a Mastodon ID. I just put this ID into the header of my blog post.
+++
date = "2022-12-13T18:28:00+01:00"
title = "Sway: tweaks and (un)usual keybindings"
...
mastodon = "109508225564672703"
+++
This ID can then be accessed as {{ .Params.mastodon }}. Note the missing .Site compared to the previous
configuration.
Provide link to comments
And second, I don’t really want this load comments method and the simple HTML sanitation. Somehow this seems to be security relevant, and I fear that this simple sanitation isn’t bullet proof.
So I just add a link to my meta data section:
diff --git a/themes/my/layouts/partials/post_meta.html b/themes/my/layouts/partials/post_meta.html
index 7b6856b..36429fe 100644
--- a/themes/my/layouts/partials/post_meta.html
+++ b/themes/my/layouts/partials/post_meta.html
@@ -36,4 +36,11 @@
{{ end }}
{{ end }}
+ {{ if isset .Params "mastodon" }}
+ <div>
+ <i class="fa fa-reply fa-fw"></i>
+ <span><a href="{{ .Site.Params.mastodon }}/{{ .Params.mastodon }}" alt="Replay">Comments</a> on Mastodon</span>
+ </div>
+ {{ end }}
+
</div>
Basically this places a reply icon (from Font Awesome) followed by the link. `{{
.Site.Params }} as seen above. Despite being simpler than Carl’s approach, his
approach doesn’t work for me because the URL <a class="button" href="https://{{ .host }}/interact/{{ .id }}?type=reply">Reply</a> uses a URL
that doesn’t work with emacs.ch. It doesn’t give any reply on this interact URL.
Caveats
Getting this up is a bit cumbersome:
- publish your blog on the internet
- use the URL to write a Mastodon toot pointing to your blog post
- fetch the mastodon ID of this post
- modify the frontmatter of your post
- republish your blog entry
Also, should you ever edit your original toot, then it will get a new ID. Under the old ID you won’t see a toot anymore. That means, that you’ll have to update your frontmatter again and republish.
If you can life with such a workflow, then you have now a nice privacy respecting method for people to comment on your posts.
Outro
And that’s all, now people see a “Comments” link at the end of my post.