[Meta] Let There Be Comments

When I left Blogger for WordPress in 2016, I made a deliberate choice to leave some features behind. Part of the allure of WordPress was the opportunity to explore PHP and to take as much ownership as I could over the inner workings of my blog. Blogger, by nature, never provided the level of customizability I was searching for, but the the chance to write my own custom WordPress theme was too appealing to pass up. Suddenly, I had the ability to customize, rewrite, and (more often than not) break almost everything that governed how my content was displayed on the Web.

Taking control did not come without tradeoffs. As previously mentioned, I never implemented comments, and until my massive update in May of this year I had some minor SEO problems like poorly apportioned <h1> tags. However, I had a platform that allowed me to experiment with web technologies on a much larger scale than before.

That was fine, because that was the point. I don’t blog for ad revenue, or to become famous (though I have my doubts that running a technology blog is really the quickest path to Internet fame). Regardless, in the spirit of constant improvement, I’ve been slowly adding features to my blog as I feel it needs them.

Once I finished some SEO work and some performance optimization, the next task was to fix the comments. I’ve implemented the generic WordPress comments template and enabled the discussion section for everything but my archived posts. In fact, I can tell it’s working, because I’ve already blocked dozens of Russian spam comments. Please enjoy.