Last night, I found Cory Zoe’s 5 minute guide to adding BlueSky-powered comments to any website. It, er, took me significantly longer than five minutes to implement, but it is looking and functioning the way I want it to and I think I understand it well enough to be able to explain it to those like me who couldn’t dream of doing this from scratch, but know enough to want to implement it and break it terribly and repeatedly.

First step is to install the library:

    npm install bluesky-comments

I moved the folder (node_modules) into the assets folder, so now I have my_folder/assets/node_modules.

In my _config.yml file, I turned on comments for posts:

    defaults:
        - scope:
            path: ""
            type: "posts"
        values:
            layout: single
            comments: true

And I set my comments provider to “custom”

    comments:
        provider: "custom"

In the _layouts/single.html from Minimal Mistakes, comments are located on lines 68-76. I wanted them to appear after the date but before the previous / next navigation buttons, so I moved them to <footer class="page__meta>.

Comments are disabled on test servers by Minimal Mistakes, so I removed that bit. If you want to re-enable it, you’ll want to wrap the <div> in

    {% if page.comments %}
        <div class="page__comments">
            {% include comments-providers/custom.html %}
        </div>
    {% endif %}

I added the CSS to _includes/head/custom.html:

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://unpkg.com/bluesky-comments@0.9.0/dist/bluesky-comments.css">

I used Cory Zoe’s code as a base and used Claude in Copilot to develop _includes/comment-providers/custom.html. Before you use this, make sure you update your username! It’s in big friendly letters “YOUR.USERNAME.HERE”

For comments to show up, you need to include

    bluesky_post_uri: "https://bsky.app/profile/YOUR.USERNAME.HERE.bsky.social/post/POSTIDHERE"

in the YAML for your post. If there is no URI, nothing will show. If there is no post activity, the comments section, but look like this (with your colors, fonts, etc.):

My partner Kyle received a kidney transplant in February 2024 after several years on the transplant list because of a genetic kidney condition. I don’t think there are words for the gift of life offered by the family of the anonymous donor, but I’m endlessly grateful.

Likewise, there are no words for to describe the loss of Kyle’s beloved mother, who passed away from complications of the same genetic disease in May. I wrote about her in July and I miss her every day.

Home

My garden is in a sorry state right now; I hope to spend a little time in it this fall to get ready for the winter planting season. I’ve been spending lots of time indoors with my cross stitch; I’m hoping my hyperfixation will allow me more than one hobby at a given time.

Work

This summer, I asked to take a step back from my management responsibilities and to join the faculty of the University of Oregon Libraries. My request was graciously granted and I have been building a new role for myself as a Strategic Projects Librarian. I’m serving as the interim subject liaison for the School of Planning, Public Planning, and Management and preparing to teach a credit bearing course for the Digital Humanities minor / Data Science major on the Cultural Analytics track during the Winter 2025 term.

Culture

I just finished watching X-Men’97 and thought it was spectacular. I may or may not be modeling my hair after Storm’s, whether physics allows it or no. Also on Disney+ is the atmospheric and delightful Agatha All Along. Katherine Hahn can read the phone book and it’s entertaining and Joe Locke is so charming I cannot believe it’s only his second role.

“If everyone likes you, you’ve probably said nothing.”

Lads, attempting to will dinner into existence