External Comment Integration

August 4th, 2011
comments, facebook, googleplus, tech
For a long time I've crossposted blog entries to facebook (and now google plus) and have avoided needing to implement commenting by letting those serve as discussion fora. I got kind of annoyed with this making the discussion fragmented and decided to fix this. Unfortunately, there's not an api available for google plus yet. So for now I just settled for pulling comments from the facebook api.

If you're interested in the technical details, I needed a pretty roundabout solution because I have two constraints: (1) I don't want people to have to authenticate with facebook or something to see the comments and (2) I can't run any server side code on my blog host. I ended up going with a simple wsgi app that pulls from facebook's graph api with an oauth token in my name, makes it into html, returns "'document.write(%s);' % json.dumps(html)", which is then included into my document with a script tag where I want the comments to show up. I do need to specify the facebook id of the post, instead of it automatically discovering it, but that's not so bad. I was originally planning to use an iframe, but it turns out that including content with an iframe that acts like part of your page instead of independently scrolling is a really hard problem involving lots of javacript and browser workarounds.

So comment away!

Update 2012-03-24: The code, minus facebook access tokens, is now on github.

Comment via: google plus, facebook

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Development RCTs Are Good Actually

In defense of trying things out

via Thing of Things March 25, 2024

Clarendon Postmortem

I posted a postmortem of a community I worked to help build, Clarendon, in Cambridge MA, over at Supernuclear.

via Home March 19, 2024

How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

In 2017, we looked at how web bloat affects users with slow connections. Even in the U.S., many users didn't have broadband speeds, making much of the web difficult to use. It's still the case that many users don't have broadband speeds, both …

via Posts on March 16, 2024

more     (via openring)