About the site

In progress of writing about it, stay tuned!

But basically:

• lightweight
• simple
• resilient

For the most part, I expect discussion on Reddit/Twitter or wherever I share my posts. However it's good to have an extra means of commenting just in case.

I'm using Isso at the moment, since it's:

• very easy to set up and admin
• very lightweight

• very simple

  Data is stored in an sqlite database, which means it would be easy to migrate the comments if I decide to switch (or at least doable, unlike Disqus where I didn't manage to change domain name).

  Also it's easy to back up, so your comments would be safe!

• not everything is easy to put under version control
  • for instance ipython notebooks are essentially huge JSONs also containing outputs. I'm using nbstripout so I can only keep important bits in git.
• sometimes things are not deterministic, for instance if you use temporary directories in literate notebooks
• large files, e.g. plots generated from ipython notebooks ideally need to be kept under version control too

• it would be nice to generate public history of changes for each page directly from git history

Disqus is a bit shit. I think of people's thoughts and comments are sacred and while I make sure mine are backed up, losing others' information is somewhat irresponsible.

So before starting the blog I actually practiced migrating domain names and post URLs (who knows, it might be necessary in the future) against a test Disqus instance, and that didn't really work well.

• you can only manage comments data via the API, and do migrations over their web tool, which is pretty manual and error prone.

  In contrast, with Isso, which I'm using at the moment I can back up the database, write a proper migration script, test it and if anything breaks, just restore the old database.

Other downsides of Disqus:

• takes noticeable time to load. I prefer my pages to be as lightweight as possible.
• shows ads. It's fair enough considering they provide hosting
• let alone usual stuff about privacy, tracking etc, but I don't know much about Disqus specifically in that regard

Selfhosting however is somewhat tedious and requires technical skill, so it's understandable many people prefer just inserting a bit of javascript from Disqus that does the job.

Ideally I'd want comments to be some sort of annotation overlay. So you could comment at any place in text, without having to jump back and forth. Perhaps one could choose any annotation platform they like and I would just need to query the comments from each of these platforms and display all of them. It's a bit vague though, so needs a proper think!

Link rot is pretty bad, Gwern writes about it in high detail.

I don't want to contribute to the problem, so at the moment I'm using linkchecker running every night in Cron, seems to work well. So far haven't had any genuinely rotten links, but it does protect against typos in urls and that sort of thing. In Firefox, I'm using Simple Link Checker addon, it also helps with checking other things, e.g. Github readmes.

At the moment preventing dead urls requires some technical skills.

Ideally it'd be more automatic, perhaps some sort of service that crawls your website every week/month or so and sends you a report. archive.org seems like an appropriate platform to kick this off.

Technical skill, tedious as well.

At the moment I'm using ispell in emacs, seems to work well, but ideally I'd like it to be integrated as a 'pre-publish' hook or something.

Also would be useful to have semantic (e.g. grammar) checks as well, I often skip words when typing.

No easy way to compare htmls. For content you can use git, but that doesn't help with design (e.g. CSS) changes that might be quite catastrophic.

At the moment, I'm using some hacky semi-automatic screenshot comparison.

Unstable – watches over content updates. By default website points at unstable version. Stable is fully static.

If something's broken about unstable version, automatically redirect to stable (custom 404 page?).

Share comments perhaps?

https://www.nbinteract.com/tutorial/tutorial_monty_hall.html

nbinteract was designed to make interactive explanations easy to create. In this tutorial, we will show the process of writing a simulation from scratch and visualizing the results interactively.

referring to <details> tag

Pretty cool, I want a similar page.

Good Habits

When publishing annotation friendly documents, be sure to:

Include a <link rel="canonical" href="…" /> tag on pages that may be available at different URLs (and for which you want to share annotations).

Include Open Graph Protocol content in your metadata

More background on good practices and relating documents together can be found in our Guidance for Web Publishers.