Comment systems have always seemed to me to be almost as important as the blog itself when niche communities come together. The sparking of discussion and then keeping that immediate context and allowing it to be discussed there has led me to learn about a ton of interesting things. I read a tweet from one of the SV people who stated how they liked the use of Twitter as a discussion forum for posts, they enjoy that if someone is to post about your article, they do it in their publisc space, and that does not have to live on your feed if you don't like the interaction. I am paraphrasing, but something along those lines.
Simply put I disagree, but using a static site takes away the easiest route of including comments to pages. I want to generate my content when I do, and push it live to my site when I do. I don't see the point of creating a system that will take my static generator, and call it every time a comment is posted. Yes, it may technically be a static site because it is serving pre-generated html, but it is also reliant on a worker on a system somewhere to be watching for changes, to incorporate those changes, and then to regenerate the content.
Similarly, piaine generates the whole site everytime it runs. It is fast, unsuprisingly, so I haven't made any effort to make it atomic, I also don't really see the need to given the very simple purpose of the program. If I am not going to just regen single pages when comments are changed, then I think it feels like overkill to generate everything again when a comment is posted. Yes it may be done in way under a second, but it's wasteful. I don't want to be wasteful.
Unfortunately, my main other aversion to items for this site is in including javascript in the pages. A small script to fetch all comments from a store somewhere and insert them into the DOM of the page would solve all this, and feels like less of an issue than generating everything every time. Needed would be a script somewhere to catch the FORM request sent from the page and store it somewhere for retrieval by the javascript.
Luckily there are a ton of previous posts online about workarounds for this issue, and there are a number of pieces of software that solve it. Commento.io, and Staticman seem the most close to what I am looking for right now, but I am uncomfortable with Staticman's reliance on git repos for the stored content. Commento is, even at it's hilariously low price, not what I want to pay for a private hobby blog that will see ~100 visits a year. Also, I really want to keep the average page size (without images) down below ~5kb. The posts should be larger than the scripts being utilised, and the posts are already just text essentially.
I am going to explore this further and try to implement something that suits my needs. We will see.