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Bluesky for comments on mkdocs blog

Background

I have recently migrated this blog from Jekyll to Mkdocs using material theme. I was also planning to move away from Disqus commenting system given all the known issues and just when I had finished the migration to Mkdocs, there was this post from Emily Liu - which showcases how easily the bluesky replies to a post can be added in comments section of a blog page. Followed closely by this, was a post from Cory Zue who created NPM packaging.

I initially was looking to use that on my blog and while searching for that package on jsdelivr, I came across the bluesky-comments-tag: a package created by Matt Kane. I understood the code behind this one much better and that was my starting point. There were two problems with the solution thus far that I wanted to solve.

Problem Description

For the comments to appear on the blog, the bluesky post url needs to be added to the frontmatter. Now that is a cyclic process because you can't post the url of your blog post on bluesky until you have published it.

This, I have solved to an acceptable flow as shown below and the "How?" is explained in this post.

Right then, the Ghost V1.0 was out a while back and they made Ghost 0.11.x an LTS so I was not in any rush to upgrade too. I have not had much time to sort this out for a while and two days back when I finally came around to check how to upgrade, my first moment of concern was that officially supported stack is for NGINX.

I have moved my blog to the Apache Stack on DigitalOcean and while on my sandbox environment I still have NGINX, that is not a place I want to host my blog from. Anyhoo, I realised soon enough that while not officially supported it s easy to bypass the restrictions so I went ahead.

The upgrade itself couldn't have been simpler considering the major version bump. The answer to the question 'Was it worth it?' is something we will have to wait and see although I am liking what I see except for the initial hiccups.

Success

EDITED AFTER THE POST: Boy oh boy - just after I finished this post I saw the latest version of Ghost V1.12 is out and it was such a painless process compared to past. Just a simple command 'ghost update' and job done. That itself makes this whole pain kind of worth it.

OK so the steps I took are as presented below.

Grav - CMS with a difference

While I love Ghost as a blogging platform, it is not best placed for things other than blogs - after all that is the basic idea behind creation of this wonderful tool.

As I wanted to host a static website using tools that don't require a database or rely on php, I went searching on interwebs. I came across a lot of options and the most popular one appears to be Jekyll and it's variants (Nikola and such) but they require a lot of terminal activity which won't go well for regular end user responsible for maintaining content of the static website in question.So I continued looking and came across this wonderful project called Grav.

Grav is super fast, very pretty and extremely easy to deploy and maintain. Additionally, it has very good documentation.

The key features that I absolutely loved are as below:

The complete walkthrough of my blogger to ghost migration

The 7 Year Itch

It can't possibly be a coincidence that this is the 7th year since I started blogging on blogger and therefore it is very likely to be a strong case of the 7 year itch syndrome but whichever way you look at it, divorce was inevitable given blogger had just stopped inspiring me.

I have been fiddling with different blogging platforms while getting accused of neglecting my sweet and loving family...😢. Ghost caught my fancy three weeks back. The last post was the beginning of our courtship and this post tells the tale of how a casual fling turned into marital commitment. 😂

To start a fresh blog, choosing any platform is easy and straight forward but to move from one platform to another is - umm... lets just say a very involved process - rewarding but involved.

Love can move mountains!!!

A complete migration from blogger to WordPress would have been way simpler. I know this as I have done it in past and it appeared like moving to Ghost would require migrating to a WordPress instance anyway. There was - I must admit - a temptation to call WordPress the home but that wouldn't have made a great love-story now - would it?

However, the much publicised WordPress route to Ghost migration did not work for me and eventually after a lot of manual copying, pasting, cleaning, pruning, hiding, reading and learning later, the self-hosted blog is all complete.

Ghost on Fedora 24

To install Ghost as my blogging platform, I had to go through a number of hoops and one of them was to get the nodejs working and what not. I figured this might as well be worth documenting in case I have to do this all over again. It might also be helpful for some other inquisitive minds. 😄

The most useful reference I found was the post on rosehosting website specific to CentOS 7.

It would have all gone well too; had it not been for the nodejs related issues which resulted in me finding the other helpful pointers from various forums.

Anyway, the steps I took to get this all working are detailed in my notes below - keeping it, where I can, true to the post I have referred above:

Configure BlogTK 1.0 for blogger

Right so I am happy with Blogilo, then why BlogTK?

It so happened that I was trying to edit my last post and for some unknown reason I was getting error in updating through Blogilo. I was not able to update through Blogilo and I think it is because of the snapshots included in the post.