React GitHub Comments Utterances

Lets say all your users are developers and already have a GitHub account so they don’t need to sign up for yet another 3rd party service like Disqus (which will also track their every move through the web 😈) Unlike Staticman that I am using for my Reviews, GitHub Issues are truly dynamic so new comments will show without having to wait for your site to rebuild and deploy You get access to all the features of GitHub Issues out of the box (notifications, moderation, reactions, etc.) Developers care about the appearance of their GitHub accounts, which is likely to result in better (or at least civil) discussion. It’s free and open source!

If your users are more privacy-minded then Disqus may not be the right fit. Software developers, for example, are extremely privacy conscious. As my blog is aimed at other software developers I use Utterances as a comment system. However, remember that your readers will need a GitHub account to leave a comment using Utterances so if your target audience do not work (or play!) within the tech industry this will not be the comment system for you.

Utterances

❤️ WithUtterances is a React Higher-Order-Component for Super LightWeight Comments Widget named Utterances.

No need Duplicated DOM Bindings for each react component

1. import withUtterances from 'with-utterances'
2. Wrap your react component
3. Pass your repo as a String
4. Done!

It uses your pathname as issue-term.

By default Utterances comes with two choices for themes:

• github-light - The normal GitHub style
• github-dark - A dark mode in the style of GitHub

More themes can be added with additional stylesheets.

• pathname - Issue title which contains the path of the current page.
• url - Issue title which contains the URL of the current page.
• title - Issue title which contains the tab title of the current page.
• og:title - Issue title which contains the Open Graph title meta.
• <serach term> - Issue title which contains the given String.

It will make your Utterances Widget to load slightly faster. <3

Demo Using withUtterance

Using GitHub pages dark theme. From the SEO component, ‘og:title’, to set the comment to a specific page. And this component with the specific meta-tags can be used, ‘anywhere’, not just posts!

You could add a issues total count button which links to your repo page issues.

Using react-github-btn

Then you can go to Button github.io to configure your buttons.

My new trick to get around window or .document module errors, which this ‘react-github-btn’ is an offending npm module is to…

First call the offending Module

Then tell React that, window !== undefined.

If you are a developer and use React this is a cool and logical way to have comments.

In my next post I will tie this component to Google Analytics as GitHub Issues.