Dev Notes 22: Thinking about a Comment System and Slight Newsletter Progress

Dev Notes (DN) document progress to other articles. Discussion is preliminary

The habit after 30 days of posting has stuck. While I thought I would take a bit of a break and scale down amount of posting, I'm left with an itch to keep going for now. I also want to take some space for some more site buildup before the next post (either the AV post or IMDb data part 2).

Designing a Comment Section for Discussion

I have long wanted to add a comment section to this site, but I've also wanted to do it a bit different than typical. Generally I don't just want comments in my own "walled garden", but encourage people out in the "town" talking about the ideas.

Probably this a fairly normal view for most websites, loosely thought of as virality, but I also don't care about some other things which opens the space of options. For example, I'm not particularly trying to keep people on the site after their stay on the current article has ended. I'd much rather them share thoughts and have discussion than to optimize for getting them to stay on the site so they click on some other article or whatever.

I think a cool solution here looks like finding comments to quote from around the web (eg, Reddit, BlueSky, or general web articles), with UX to encourage starting or participating in discussion around the web. I have seen few sites pull comments from other places for comments like ATProto (Bluesky) or ActivityPub (Mastodon), GitHub Discussions, but I haven't found one with the ambition to do internet-wide versions. I looked at a few alternatives, but don't think any of these seem quite ideal.

I started sketching out some design here. I am trying to figure out how grand to scope for. I will hack this together to just work for me, but if I have ambition or thoughts other people might actually want to use it might change the design a little bit. I hope to play with that more in the next week or two and have more to share then.

Checking in on Where I am on with Newsletter

In DN-17 and DN-18 I discussed making a newsletter for the site to give an option for people who truly want to know about updates.

I played with that some more today. I set up Amazon AWS SES ( just an AWS service that handles sending the emails) and it seems to be working.

It's worth checking in on where things are with that.

• ✅ Decide a stack -> Listmonk/Lightsail/AWS SES
• ✅ Get server running
• ✅ Demonstrate toy sending to myself
• ⏳ Get production approval from AWS SES
• Experiment with different lists for different amounts of posts (eg only main posts, or more)
• Make some kind of signup component for putting at the bottom of articles

Then nonblocking stuff:

• Customize the signup confirm email and templates
• Rendering from article MDX to newsletter HTML (not necessarily blocking given can just hack a notification email with just like "here's a post" even without the full text)
• Maintainability steps (also not blocking. the list can die)
  • Configure db backups to S3
  • Configure auto recover if the instance fails
• Cleaning up the landing signup to redirect directly to the site

Hopefully by later in the week I will get approval for production access for SES. This can let me more easily experiment.

In my own test emails to myself the signup went to junk. I'm not sure if this is some combination of brand new domain to send emails, the default emails from listmonk, or some extra things I need to do. This will be later experiments.

Conclusion

The blog continues! I'm looking forward to building out a few more features and getting out the other articles this week.