Jekyll Mail comments

This gem fetches email from your mailbox by filtering with specific suffix, it makes data files which you can use to generate Jekyll comments.

How it works ?

You've to setup mailbox, on Jekyll pages you will have mailto link which opens native system mail client with pre filled subject.
Person who wants to comment message write message to your specific email address.
Fetch program watch for special subject suffix to distinct comments from other emails
Fetch program generate json based data files which perfectly fits to Jekyll data system https://jekyllrb.com/docs/datafiles/

What is the purpose ?

Jekyll static site generator has no comments system
Don't want to inject 3rdparty javascript code to work with SaSS comments system
Any RDBS for static site generator is overhead

How-to Setup

Go to your jekyll site cd ~/jekull_site
Install gem gem install mail_comments
Setup credentials

There few credentials your have to setup before run:

MC_LOGIN - Login to imap server MC_PASSWORD - Password for imap server MC_HOST - IMAP server hostname MC_PORT - IMAP server port ** MC_SUBJECT_SUFFIX - Suffix to filter comments

You have put this as environment variables see .env.dist
jekyll-mail-comments-fetch
After that you will get comments data files inside Jekyll data directory - _data

After that if new comments are present it will generate data files with comments which you can process with Jekyll with data tag. See here. https://jekyllrb.com/docs/datafiles/ or below.

Here is how to you can include comments block into your Jekyll post template


    <section>
        {% include comments-count.html replies_to=page.path %}

        {% if comment_count %}
        <h2>Comments ({{- comment_count -}}) <small class="text-muted">Read carefuly </small> </h2>
        {% include comments.html replies_to=page.path indent_class="ml-auto" title=page.title %}
        {% else %}
        <h2>No comments here yet <small class="text-muted">Write here gently</small></h2>
        {% endif %}
        <div class="mt-3"><a class="btn btn-outline-secondary btn-block" href="https://github.com/noroot/jekyll-mail-comments/blob/master/mailto:{{site.comments.email}}?subject=RE:{{page.path}}:{{site.comments.subject_suffix}}:{{page.title}}">Write a comment</a> </div>
    </section>

Templates can be found inside templates directory of this gem.

Credits

Inspiration while searching for already existing gem for email comments

Example

https://falsetrue.io