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As I’ve just started to build my personal website, I wanted to add a comment section for each published article. Previously I’ve used Disqus to do so - however, this time I wanted to keep it as lightweight as possible.

The problem with Disqus

Disqus is a great product, no question there. But all the great features Disqus has to offer come with a price. A price you will pay with the loading time of your website:

If you are interested in details how Disqus works, check out the article I wrote a few years back on the topic on the RisingStack blog: On Third-Party JavaScript - In Production Case-Study.

What I ended up using instead: GitHub

GitHub has a very well documented REST API, which exposes most of the resources used by GitHub. Luckily, it also exposes issues, with all of their information, including comments! 🤗

The only thing left was to write a small JavaScript snippet that grabs the details of an issue and append it to the website. The script looks like something like this:

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const apiUrl = 'https://api.github.com/repos/gergelyke/gergelyke.github.io/issues/<%- page.githubIssueId %>/comments'



$( function ( ) {

$.ajax(apiUrl, {

headers: {

Accept: 'application/vnd.github.v3.html+json'

},

dataType: 'json' ,

success: function ( comments ) {

const $commentSection = $( '.blog-post-comments' )

comments.forEach( function ( comment ) {

$commentSection.append(

`

<div class="comment">

<a class="commenter" href=" ${comment.user.html_url} "

target="_blank"> ${comment.user.login} </a>,

${ new Date (comment.created_at).toUTCString()}

<p>

${comment.body_html}

</p>

</div>

`

)

})

}

})

})



Actually, you can already comment on this post using the very technique you just read about! Give it a try! 😎

You can see the actual implementation here.

Gotchas

As most solutions, using GitHub for the comment engine on your site has some drawbacks:

GitHub rate limits its’ APIs, so this solution won’t work if you have a huge number of visitors,

it only suits audiences with GitHub accounts.

If you are ok with this limitations, GitHub provides a great way to let your audience comment on your writings.