Hey guys, I only recently started using Jekyll and really like it overall and was looking for a free way to add comments to my static blog posts and ended up doing it with Google Forms/Google Sheets.
I hadn’t really seen any posts about doing it this way so I wrote a little article about it here:
Let me know what you think about the approach! Or even if you have feedback on my writing, that’s always appreciated as well.
Thanks!
Try Disqus. That is the common way of adding comments to Jekyll. Maybe in the Jekyll docs but here on the Discqus site.
And if you use config you can enable site wide not just per post
This seems brilliant to me! As soon as I find some free time, I will add this to my site. Thank you!
Thanks for the suggestion. As mentioned in the article, I did look into Disqus but decided not to use it as it didn’t really line up with what I was looking for from a feature perspective
This is a very cool solution and I will play with it soon, thank you!
I read this topic and learned there are some limitations to consider. For example, Google Sheets allows 5 million rows and the form responses go against your daily email limits depending on your free or paid (G Suite) accounts.
Those numbers are pretty high and I assume if you have a blog that big, you may not be using Jekyll or would at least want to use another service provider that solely focuses on commenting. Just thought I would share that this could be a concern for some people with more popular blogs.
Thanks again!
Oh that’s actually super informative. I hadn’t seen the limitations that you had posted previously, but I had a feeling there is some limit. Luckily (or maybe unluckily 
), I’m not getting THAT many responses to my articles but if I ever start running into problems with those limits I would definitely be in the zone where I’d be willing to pay to not manage it myself anymore I think
That’s so brilliant! I’m wondering what would be the best solution if I want to add comment level (when replying someone) to this?
For that, I think you would have to use some sort of comment id, I think forms always puts the responses on a new line of the spreadsheet so you may be able to use the row number. I am unsure of how to pull that value using the google viz SQL though
If anyone’s interesed, I feel that a possible way might be fetching row number use timestamp as data-id in html, and posting something like “parent id” together with other data when replying to someone.
Row number will change if some comments are deleted, while for normal blog it’s quite unlikely that two comments share one identical timestamp.
That’s true, timestamp does seem to be a reasonable choice. One thing I would note though is that the deleted comments aren’t actually replaced. For me, it seems like when I delete a form response, the next form response will skip that row entirely in the spreadsheet (so there are empty rows)
this is awesome !!!
Is there protect from spammers?
I spent weeks getting staticman running (it’s now stable 
) . .this is such a great alternative .
Unfortunately, after inordinately long testing, I find that the necessary JavaScript does not survive the “compress” layout http://jch.penibelst.de/. On the detailed compress page under “Restrictions” it is suggested to change “//” comments to /* … */ which I did, but still no dice, also moving the JS to a file did not help. I really like the compress effects so I will not use this interesting way to add comments. Thanks anyway, best, Michael
I have just updated the requisite file to be more resistant to being broken during minification/compression. I also included an update section that talks about the minification changes, a lazy-loading approach, and potential date display issues.