A new home already?
This is absolutely ridiculous, I know, but soon after I “finished” setting up my site with FlowerShow and enabling comments with Giscus, I started bumping into some limitations of the platform that I just couldn’t get past. Now I don’t mean to sound negative about FlowerShow, it’s a marvellous platform for taking your content and putting it up on the web, making it look good and to support community engagement. The developers, too, seem super nice and are very responsive.
But Giscus as a comment system is not great. You can see my thoughts on it over here. Even with that, though, FlowerShow also doesn’t have a way to specify a custom CSS to apply to the Giscus widget and because it is loaded inside an iframe there’s no way for me to style it with any CSS on my website. So that’s not awesome. For anyone to leave a comment they need to have a github account and I can’t even make the comment box look like it belongs with the rest of my content.
Then I ran into another problem where comments and reactions weren’t showing up on my site or they would appear on the wrong pages. Once I understood the reason for that I was able to work around it, but I wouldn’t have needed to if I’d been able to use a built-in feature of Giscus but the FlowerShow configuration UI didn’t give me the option to do that.
I engaged with the FlowerShow devs on github and they were very helpful, but ultimately I thought I could probably spend just a little more time on my own to learn how I really wanted my content to look on the web and it’d likely pay off because then I’d have full front-to-back control.
I checked out CloudFlare pages, which sort of worked for me, but since the technology I opted to use to build my site is Hugo the easiest way I had to verify my content before I publish it involves using a Docker container running the framework, I couldn’t go with CloudFlare in the end. The version of Hugo they support is very old.
So how here I am, much, much later, on my new home on Github Pages using Disqus for comments. And now I have a published license for my content here (it’s creator-friendly, like me!) and an Acceptable Use Policy because Disqus strongly suggests I should have one and that kinda makes sense.
That’s pretty much it. I still have several stories in progress in various stages of completion (all of them are some version of “not”, unfortunately) but maybe now I can stop obsessing over prettying this place up and defining my workflow and get back to creating my silly little stories.
🤩