## The site In case you missed the footer, this is using [Nikola](https://getnikola.com/). I wanted something lightweight and fast, so I was gonna go with [Hugo](https://gohugo.io), but I find Go's `text/template` rather annoying to work with. So I tried out [Pelican](https://getpelican.com/) briefly, but apparently it doesn't do incremental compilation very well, and that is important to me. Next I looked at Nikola and I quite like it! It does support incremental compilation (although it's kinda slow to start up, so that may not pay off for a while) and it uses [Jinja](https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/stable/) which I quite adore <3 ## The comments Getting comments on here was quite a journey. I wanted something that federated over ActivityPub, so I first tried [Pinka](https://pinka.dev) but I couldn't get it to federate properly. So then I tried [Leah's Mastodon-API fetching script](https://blog.leahdevs.xyz/p/federated-blog-comments/) along with [GoToSocial](https://gotosocial.org/) and a read-only API key. Turns out there's a bug in that script which doesn't allow top level comments from other servers. At this point I was running out of options, so I ended up just going with [Isso](https://isso-comments.de), which is an old Python project that just does local comments and nothing else. I really wanted federation though, but I figure this is even lower friction because it doesn't require an account.