Bluesky Comments

As of this post, posts on this blog will each be associated with a Bluesky post and display that post and its responses inline.

I was inspired to do this by several example implementations. It's particularly appealing for a static blog to manage comments in this way, since I don't have to set up Disqus or maintain any kind of backend service myself to handle comments.

I started with the Nikola mastodoncomments plugin. My implementation of the Bluesky version is in the repo for this blog at https://github.com/handyman5/handyman5.github.com/tree/src/plugins/blueskycomments; I don't have the time to pretty it up and submit a PR, but it's available if anybody wants to purloin it and do so.

I ran into quite a bit of trouble though, since Nikola doesn't support any modern Javascript frontend systems (like React) out of the box. I had to write my own implementation and my Javascript is very rusty. I like what I wound up with, though; since it's using the oEmbed widget, the posts will always be rendered with the newest features, and I didn't have to go to the trouble of tinkering with the Bluesky API apart from getting the post responses in the first place. I could have added support for npm to my automated build pipeline and used this npm package but I don't know npm well and I worried it'd be overkill. If I run into any problems with my code, though, I'll probably switch to that rather than pouring lots of time into tinkering.

The other trouble I ran into is that the logic uses a fetch function to grab each comment, and it was appending them into the body in an arbitrary order based on when the functions returned. It took me a while to figure out a good strategy for ensuring that the comments appear in the correct order (i.e. the way the API returns the set initially). I don't have an implementation of nesting the replies, but I can't imagine any of my posts will get that many responses so I'm not super worried about it. 😅

At any rate, it's working, and I'm jazzed.