Experimenting with hypothes.is

The downside to a static website generator is the inability to have comments on a blog; the upside to a static website generator is the inability to have comments on a blog.

Well, sort of. Useful comments are good, sadly on most blog sites I ever had to look after, about 99% (figure plucked from the air) are spam. But sometimes the occasional helpful comment or thanks does appear, which it's a shame to lose.

One possible solution to this, amongst many other problems, is the system provided by Hypothes.is, which intends to implement Open Annotation standards on websites, (once the standard is a standard anyway. I'm experimenting with this, as you can tell by the appearance on the right hand side of your browser, assuming you are a human being reading this page, of a pop out sidebar which you can use to annotate anything on the page, or read and respond to previous comments/annotations.

It doesn't quite work yet as a blog commenting system, for example to search for any comments left on my site, I have to filter by URL instead of by domain. For the moment, I'm filtering by tag, so if you want me to see your comment, use "tiro" as the tag. Spammers, please don't apply.

If this is left a public comment, it can then by discovered by filtering the Hypothes.is feed like so:

https://hypothes.is/stream?q=tags:tiro

or as an Atom feed:

https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?tags=tiro

which can be subscribed to be a feed reader of your choice. For notifications, I'm hooking it up to Pushover via IFTT, but Slack would be another route.