Hexo was so perfect and fast that I thought I will live with it happily ever after forever. Shortly, after I migrated this blog from Octopress 2.x to Hexo, I came across Hugo static generator with support for blogging. The idea of having a blazingly fast static generator written in a compiled native language seemed intriguing to me. I tried to migrate my blog to Hugo soon after multiple times which led to failure every single time due to lack of a few features in Hugo.
Fast-forward, I played around with Gutenburg (written in Rust) a few month back. I found it to be an awesome project. Not only, every feature put together thoughtfully, but also the developer is very very responsive and welcomes new ideas and contributions warmly. Nonetheless, it’s still young and immature. So, it failed me too.
I came back to check out Hugo once more last week and to my surprise, I found it really stable and production ready with tons of features and themes. So, here is my new blog ported over to the mighty Hugo.
P.S. Although Hugo satisfies all my current needs, I’m more interested in Rust projects than the Go ones since I’m playing around with Rust as an alternative to Modern C++ these days. So, I’ll keep an eye on Gutenberg; who knows another port might be underway :)
Posted on April 29, 2016
34 minutes
Mamadou Babaei
Update 1 [2016/09/30]:A section has been added to the end of the article for dealing with major FreeBSD upgrades.
Update 2 [2016/09/30]:A section has been added to the end of the article for upgrading current installation of Discourse to newer versions.
Update 3 [2016/09/30]:A section has been added to the end of the article for installing Discourse under Ruby version managers which is required for dealing with newer versions of Discourse since the current system-wide version of Ruby on FreeBSD is 2.2.5p319.
Update 4 [2016/10/06]:I decided to get rid of Discourse on this blog for various reasons including negative feedback from my readers, performance issues, being a memory hog and not so easy on memory, difficult maintenance, dealing with building Ruby Gems which is a tedious task in case they fail to build and a bug that duplicates my posts and creates a new thread for each post which means it won’t show previous comments. Last but not least, in my estimation it’s too heavy for such a small task such as a comment system.As a result, this guide won’t be maintained anymore.
Figure 1. Discourse Logo
Well, when it comes to blog comment hosting services for static blogs, you will have a plethora of options such as SolidOpinion, Disqus, Livefyre, Google+ or Facebook comments, and many more. Unfortunately, such services has never been an option for me and I resisted them like forever. Yes, I’ve got one million reasons to believe and do so which demands another post of its own. So, I’ll avoid that argument for now.
This left me with two choices:
Operate my blogs without the comment section as I did for years
Since people asked me for a way to discuss their feedback on the website, this made the former choice a no go, anymore. So, in a search for the promised commenting system, I spent hours installing and trying every single FLOSS commenting system on GitHub. And everyone of them has had a big flaw that I could not tolerate. Finally, I came to the conclusion that I’m out of luck with that. Of course, I always had the option to write my own commenting system according to my own needs. As, I did with my own blog subscription system. But, due to the lack of time that was not an option either.
It happens that I randomly visit Coding Horror by Jeff Atwood the co-founder of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange Network. I’ve always read the comments on Coding Horror but never had an urge to write a comment their. Since I’ve been desperately looking for a commenting system, this time the different look of its comment system catched my attention. Bingo! He wrote an open source discussion platform software named Discourse. Not necessarily a blog comment system, but could be used as one. It even supports the Farsi language and RTL out of the box which allows me to use it on my Farsi blog, too. In addition to that it supports multi-site which means I have to only run one instance for all my blogs. Just perfect!
Despite many nice feature it provides, it has a few rough edges, too. I was able to conquer some and some couldn’t, yet. But it did not stop me from integrating it into my Hexo-based blogs after two weeks of testing it. So, there it is, from now on both this blog and my Farsi blog are discussion aware :).
OK, the main issue that many people face when they want to install Discourse in a platform other than GNU/Linux, is they get hit in the face by the reading this line in the official documentation:
Why do you only officially support Docker?
Hosting Rails applications is complicated. Even if you already have Postgres, Redis and Ruby installed on your server, you still need to worry about running and monitoring your Sidekiq and Rails processes. Additionally, our Docker install comes bundled with a web-based GUI that makes upgrading to new versions of Discourse as easy as clicking a button.
Yes, I know Ruby and Rails are crap and deploying Ruby on Rails apps are pain in the Butt. Do not worry! This was the first struggle with Discourse that I had since this blog runs on FreeBSD. And, FreeBSD support for Docker is experimental, yet. Fortunately, I used to deploy GitLab instances on FreeBSD for three years which was also RoR before I migrated to Gogs which kicks butt, anyway! That made it easy to figure out a simple way to deploy Discourse without Docker on FreeBSD.
Well, I was living a happy life with Octopress 2.x despite the fact that I didn’t do much blogging in the past couple of years. Moreover, in my estimation Octopress still should be considered as one of the greatest blogging platforms among its peers and I really got nothing against it. But, I see a few shortcomings which made me looking for alternatives (and some of these still affects the 3.x version of Octopress):
