Never Read The Comments
As a fun little project I started playing around with Firebase and this Jekyll blog. In a move I hope to not live to regret, I made it possible to submit comments!
Update (December 2016): Retired (aka nuked) the code shown in this tutorial from my blog. As much fun as it was to over-engineering a comments section in Jekyll, it’s time to retire the seldomn used (if ever) comments section. Incidentally, the tutorial led me to learn how to use Google’s reCAPTCHA and Liquid templating which was fun.
Lastly, due to Google’s aquisition of Firebase shortly after this post was published, I was able to painlessly transfer the database from the legacy servers to the shiny new Material Design interface at Firebase Console
Folks who have pertinent and kind comments can scroll to the bottom of a post and enter a name, message, and an optional email for a Gravatar image.
Isn’t that nice?
I used part 3 of an article from CSS-Tricks1, so if you’re curious, go ahead and follow those directions. The only tricky part was configuring the security rules.
If I get hit with lots of spam, I will need to take corrective steps, but for now the only validation that is done is checking for the presence of a name and a message.
Firebase is really cool, fast and well documented. I am loving the realtime NoSQL cloud database which stores data as familiar JSON objects. For a simple blog it does seem to be a bit overkill, but I just love to over-engineer this lil’ blog to bits.
Got feedback? Leave a comment, bub. Or, you know, just reach out to me on Twitter or email.