Demo and installation instructions

Talkyard is a commenting system for Hexo and other static site generators. It’s open source; you can install it for free on your server. There’s serverless hosting — no ads, no tracking, free for low traffic blogs.

This website is a static Hexo blog, with Talkyard comments — look at the bottom of the pages. Talkyard is forum software too, with chat and question-answers features: you can create a community for your website, integrated with the blog comments.

Demo video:

Demo discussion (the one in the video).

Quick test if this is for you

Two steps for trying out Talkyard, without signing up or getting a server:

  1. Add this to your _config.yml file:

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    talkyard_server_url: https://comments-demo.talkyard.io
  2. Do real installation step 3 (three) below, i.e. add the html for the comments.

Now, regenerate your blog and look at the comment section that should appear below the blog posts. You can post test comments but they’ll disappear later on some day.

Help forum: https://www.talkyard.io/forum/latest/support.

If you like it, then do real installation step 1 below, and step 2 again — and this time, specify the address to your own Talkyard comments site. (Skip step 3, you’ve done it already.)

Real installation

Install this commenting system in three steps:

  1. Go to https://www.talkyard.io/plans and choose Blog Comments. Type the address to your blog. Copy the address to your new embedded comments site.

  2. In your Hexo site configuration, i.e. _config.yml, add this config value and paste the address:

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    talkyard_server_url: https://comments-for-your-site.talkyard.net
  3. Add this where you want the comments to appear:

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    TEST001

    <% if (!index && post.comments && config.talkyard_server_url){ %>
    <section id="comments">
    <script>talkyardServerUrl='<%= config.talkyard_server_url %>';</script>
    <script async defer src="<%= config.talkyard_script_url || 'https://c1.ty-cdn.net/-/talkyard-comments.min.js' %>"></script>
    <div class="talkyard-comments" data-discussion-id="<%= post.discussion_id %>" style="margin-top: 45px;">
    <noscript>Please enable Javascript to view comments.</noscript>
    <p style="margin-top: 25px; opacity: 0.9; font-size: 96%">Comments powered by
    <a href="https://www.talkyard.io">Talkyard</a>.</p>
    </div>
    </section>
    <% } %>

    For this blog, I placed it at the bottom of the file themes/landscape/layout/_partial/article.ejs.

    Restart Hexo, reload the page in the browser. Do you see a comments section now? If so, remove TEST001. If not — do you see TEST001? If you do see TEST001 but not the comments, then ask for help, see below. If you don’t see TEST001, you added the comments code at the wrong place, or you’re looking at the wrong page.

  4. Optionally, add a frontmatter discussion_id: per-discussion-id to your blog posts / articles.
    Then, you can change the URL to your posts, without the embedded discussion disappearing.

You can ask for help in the support forum.

Comments powered by Talkyard.