Isso – Ich schrei sonst

You love static blog generators (especially Acrylamid cough) and the only option to interact with your community is Disqus. There's nothing wrong with it, but if you care about the privacy of your audience you are better off with a comment system that is under your control. This is, where Isso comes into play.

Try Yourself!

Features

CRUD comments written in Markdown
SQLite backend, Disqus import
client-side JS (currently 54kb minified, 18kb gzipped)
I18N, available in german and english (also fallback)

Installation

Python 2.6, 2.7 or 3.3
a working C compiler

Install Isso with:

~> pip install isso

Set your database location and website:

~> cat my.cfg
[general]
dbpath = /var/lib/isso/comments.db
host = http://example.tld/

Optional: you can import your comments from Disqus.com:

~> isso -c my.cfg import ~/Downloads/user-2013-09-02T11_39_22.971478-all.xml
[100%]  53 threads, 192 comments

Now start the server:

~> isso -c my.cfg run
2013-10-30 09:32:48,369 WARNING: unable to connect to SMTP server
2013-10-30 09:32:48,408 INFO: connected to HTTP server

Make sure, Isso can connect to the server that hosts your blog, otherwise you are not able to post comments.

Website Integration

You can run Isso on a dedicated domain or behind a sub URI like /isso. It makes actually no difference except for the webserver configuration (see below).

Whatever method you prefer (just change the URL), to embed comments add

<script src="http://example.tld/js/embed.min.js"></script>

to your HTML (presumedly into <head>) and

<div id="isso-thread"></div>

below your post. That's all. The JavaScript client will automatically detect the API endpoint.

To show the comment count for posts (but no comments), add

<script src="http://example.tld/js/count.min.js"></script>

to your header and all links ending with #isso-thread are updated with the current comment count.

This functionality is already included when you embed embed.min.js, do not mix embed.min.js and count.min.js in a single document.

Webserver configuration

nginx configuration to run Isso on /isso:

server {
    listen       [::]:80;
    listen       [::]:443 ssl;
    server_name  example.tld;
    root         /var/www/example.tld;

    location /isso {
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Script-Name /isso;
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
    }
}

nginx configuration to run Isso on a dedicated domain:

server {
    listen       [::]:8080;
    server_name  comments.example.tld;

    location / {
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
    }
}

Documentation

Alternatives

talkatv – Python
Juvia – Ruby on Rails
Tildehash.com – PHP
SO: Unobtrusive, self-hosted comments

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