Site Update!

Comments

Actually a huge pain in the ass to set up, as a person who is only moderately technical. For someone who’s comfortable and familiar with the languages and structures, I imagine it wouldn’t be terrible, though. I’m using Staticman because I’m a fan of not requiring anyone to sign up for some kind of account, and my jekyll theme already plays well with it. That said, I still had to jump around to a few different places for documentation, including this guide, this other guide, and this additional guide for nested replies.

Along the way, to my relief, I found out that you can use openssl through the GitHub desktop app instead of having to go through the intimidating process of setting up openssl otherwise. I tried out the version of openssl that Heroku directs you to here, but it’s so old windows doesn’t register that I’m trying to use it; so, I just generated a new RSA key with the version that came with Git.

I had some silly issues, including a failure to notice that my branch was ‘main’ not ‘master’ and I learned both about namespaces in the first place, and that the code that I’d copied skipped one (instead of site.comments.staticman.branch, all I had was site.staticman.branch - insufficient!). I was also plagued by an error regarding a favicon.ico bit, which I think is due to the way that the site I’m referencing has their images set up - oh well, no fancy spinning load icon for now. That’s some very minor UX troubleshooting for another day.

The largest hurdle for me to overcome was actually a case of good ‘ol user error: I misunderstood what information I was supposed to put into the github private key field on the Heroku-side, so the app wasn’t actually connecting. After many sad and fruitless attempts at properly deciphering the error messages in Chrome’s inspector console, and much checking and re-checking of my site files, I figured I probably bombed outta the Heroku setup. I doubled back, verified that I had stored the correct private key (not the bit that’s in the page on GitHub, but the bit that was downloaded to my PC), generated a new RSA key for Heroku to encrypt my things-in-need-of-encryption (namely reCAPTCHA), and… voila - comments are finally functional.

I am straddling the feelings of ‘I am awesome’ and ‘I am a big idiot’ and that’s totally cool with me.