Update, October 2017: I’ve shut the experiment down early. The comments section described here no longer appears on Fogknife posts. More information here.

As an experiment, I have enabled comments on this blog. Every post-specific webpage on Fogknife now ends with a Disqus-based comments section, and posts on the blog’s front page each conclude with a hyperlink to these comments. To the best of my knowledge, I’ve disabled all tracking and advertising stuff from it.

My comments policy also appears after every post:

I welcome all topical and respectful comments, via the comment-thingy below. You must log in to said thingy prior to commenting. I reserve the right to remove comments I find abusive or misplaced.

Absent surprising levels of disaster or disappointment, I plan to keep comments enabled through at least the end of the year. If they seem to bring enough goodness to the Fogknife experience to compensate for their cost in additional complexity, then I’ll likely keep them around after that.

I chose Disqus due to its conceptual simplicity, the friendly admin tools and thorough documentation it offers on its website, and its allowance for exporting all comments. Self-hosted Disqus alternatives do exist, and I would have chosen one had any offered the feature-set I desired for Fogknife. But none quite made the cut — and, no, I do not at this time wish to roll my own comments system.

For my fellow Plerd users, I wrote up a page on Plerd’s wiki about how to add Disqus support to one’s blog. It requires a few short paste-in additions to one of your template files. Once I figured it out, I felt pretty pleased at how simple an operation it is.

(Stupid confession: I wasted a lot of time not understanding why my comments sections weren’t appearing, because I forgot that I had Ricky Romero’s Shut Up extension installed in Safari — and I’d never whitelisted Fogknife for it, because why would I have?)