Pelican-Gist-Comments Plugin
The other day I created Pelican-Gist-Comments, a plugin for Pelican that allows a Pelican site owner to utilize Gists as a comment engine for his blog posts. Essentially, a Gist will be created for an article (based on its slug) whenever it is rendered into HTML by Pelican. The ID of the Gist will then be stored in gist_comment_ids.json and added to the article's metadata as 'gist_id'. Afterwards, the ID can be accessed in a template via {{ article.gist_id }}. For more information, see this example template.
However, the notion behind this plugin is not without its faults. At this time, Gists do not notify their owner whenever a user posts a comment. However, it may be possible to circumvent this limitation by writing a small program that occasionally checks the comments on your Gists and alerts you when their numbers change. In addition, the user must have a GitHub account to post a comment (but I suppose this may help reduce spam).
I don't believe Pelican-Gist-Comments is a finished product by any means but it was a very fun plugin to hack together. Nonetheless, I hope you find it useful. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please submit an issue or pull request.
Written on . Categorized under: 2013. Tagged as: meta, github, writing, python.