After setting up nanoblogger, I experimented with several different comment add-ons/plugins. However, they all had their own issues.
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NBCom, previously discussed, does not integrate very well at all with nanoblogger. It has a completely different look, and it uses PHP and MySQL, which goes against the idea behind nanoblogger.
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Blogkomm uses some crufty old PHP4 scripts and has very poor documentation, as well as an admin tool that I could not get to work.
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CGIComment, JS-Kit, and Haloscan, all of which are mentioned in the nanoblogger manual, seem to have vanished.
So, I decided to write my own comment system. In the spirit of nanoblogger, it’s a Bash-based system that stores plaintext files for every comment, organized similarly to blog posts. The comments are stored as such:
BLOG_DIR/comments/NB_EntryID/<comment number>.txtIt really only required me to change about 3 lines in the main nb script, and I had to slightly modify a few of the templates and CSS styles.
The main workhorse is a Bash CGI script, right at 100 lines of code. I’m sure it could probably be improved upon, but it’s working for me.
Rather than write a whole instruction manual on setting this up, I decided to just push it all up to github. If you want to use this, just pull the code from there and install it the same way that you would normally install nanoblogger. I also included the theme for my blog in that repo.
Two caveats:
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Your webserver must be set up to allow CGI scripts to run from
BLOG_DIR/cgi-bin/. An example for your apache.conf/http.conf/vhosts.conf/etc. is as follows:ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /srv/http/www.thestegemans.com/cgi-bin/ <Directory "/srv/http/www.thestegemans.com/cgi-bin"> AllowOverride None Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> -
Javascript must be enabled in the browser for comments to appear.
I may try to get the main nanoblogger project to incorporate these changes soon.
Happy commenting!