Aussienomics is powered by Hugo, a database-free static site generator. The main benefits are security (nothing to hack) and lightning-fast speed.
However, there’s also a downside: with no database, there’s no way to natively enable reader comments without using a server somewhere. The go-to solution is a third party such as Disqus—but that comes with uncomfortable privacy issues—or to self-host an open source service.
After debating whether it was even worth the hassle to add comments to Aussienomics, I decided to bite the bullet and do the latter. After all, I’m already self-hosting a Listmonk instance (the newsletter), so what’s another Docker image?
Anyway, after a couple of hours of playing around with the configuration and messing with third party OAuth providers, I managed to successfully install Remark42, and comments are now enabled for all posts, past and present!
You can now reply to any post by using an email address (it won’t be made public) or by linking an existing Google or GitHub account.