I was never really satisfied with my own blog coding and was looking around for alternatives that seemed fitting. I didn’t want to use an external service to host the blog, but I felt it was important to allow all visitors to post comments, not just registered users.
The first goal can easily be realized with static website generators. I found jekyll very appealing since it supports markdown (just less writing for nicely formatted output). However, after several unsuccessful attempts to install it on Snow Leopard (thank you, Apple!), I gave up and went for the python equivalent hyde. Its documentation is somewhat scarce, but I managed to find my way.
The solution for the second goal (commenting for everybody on the blog pages) came along while I looked at blogs that are created with hyde. I found this one very well done, and it used comments from Disqus that I have seen a lot recently. So I decided to give it a try. Disqus has just launched their new version of the discussion plugin, which aims at bundling all your discussions in one place. I’m not convinced myself whether I should find this convenient or borderline scary. But I wanted to give all visitors the choice to use it.
With hyde, I also added the help pages, which are really just the Getting started guide by now. I will flesh this out, soon.
Finally, as you can see on the left I also added four social media share buttons (for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn) to make it easier to share blog and help pages with others. If you feel, there is an important service missing, leave a comment below. These buttons are likely to come to the paper pages as well…