In my last post I blogged about updating my blog to a static site generated by Jekyll and hosted on GitHub Pages. In that article I mentioned a few improvements that I wanted to make and now that they are done I thought a little update would be nice.

First, I added commenting back to the blog using Disqus. Disqus makes it fairly simple to get set up quickly. When you sign up for an account and add a site, Disqus gives you a snippet of HTML and JavaScript (choose "Universal" code if you're using Jekyll) to embed in the pages where you want commenting and the documents are pretty good about explaining the configuration.

If you are going to generate your Jekyll site locally for testing purposes the following bit of info is helpful.

The only required Disqus configuration is the "disqus_shortname" variable, however if you do not supply the "disqus_identifier" variable the embed code uses the page url as the identifier. This means that the identifier will be different for your local site and your production site which means comments in one won't show in the other and that your Disqus dashboard for the site will show twice the actual number of discussions. That may be what you want, but it wasn't what I wanted. Here is an example configuration using Jekyll:

/* * * CONFIGURATION VARIABLES: EDIT BEFORE PASTING INTO YOUR WEBPAGE * * */
var disqus_shortname = 'yourshortname'; // required: replace example with your forum shortname
var disqus_identifier = "2014-01-13-more-blog-updates";
var disqus_title = "More blog updates | ";
As a side note, I realized afterwards that Jekyll's page.id variable would have worked for the disqus_identifier just as well as the parsing of the page url that I did.

The other improvement I made was to add an Atom feed for the site. I may do another post later to highlight a couple sticking points I had when setting that up, but it was relatively simple as well. For now I'll just link to the file that generates the feed xml.