Does anyone read LJ any more?

I've decided to finally create my own blog. https://www.sweharris.org/ is the URL. Why, you may ask?

Well, firstly I want that blog to be a bit more professional. So mostly it's just going to be tech oriented. I've taken some of the content from my old site, some of the posts I've made here, and backdated them to the new blog.

But also I may want to post some non-professional stuff; I'll keep posting that here. Sure, sure, a potential employer googling for me may find this site (or other sites I run) and realise I have non-tech interests (hmm; is the difficulty with typing while wearing handcuffs a tech issue? Hmm...) but I'm not trying to _hide_ that part of me, just have a blurry line.

It's not good, I know. One reason I haven't created a personal blog site before is that I like how "everything is in one place" at LJ. But fewer and fewer people update (I see more linode status RSS updates than real posts at times!) and more and more people have their own blog.

If I remember, everytime I create a new blog post I'll link to it on my twitter feed (@sweharris). And I've just told LJ to repost my twitter entries, so links will show up here. I wonder if I can automate that twitter entry. Hmm...

Are there alternatives to Disqus?

My new blog is "static content". I don't use Wordpress or Joomla or similar. Instead I use a "content generator"; in this case Hugo. It takes a bunch of markdown and a theme and generates HTML which I can then rsync to my external servers. Hugo is pretty neat (see https://www.sweharris.org/post/2016-04-02-newsite/). It also means I don't run heavy PHP processes and databases on my servers so it's quick to serve.

The problem is that I feel I need a comment section. (Maybe I'm overestimating the people who will want to engage with me!). A static site doesn't work well for that. I could use something like Isso but then I've got to worry about syncing of the backend DB and stuff.

So currently I'm using Disqus. I don't really like Disqus. It's heavy with javascript, is privacy busting, leverages user views to generate ad income...

But it's free, does anti-spam, allows for moderation, and I don't know of any alternative.

Are there any?