The weird thing is I had a WordPress theme I'd hacked together over the past few years with a blue bar across the top that had become a little too close to Facebook's look. So over the last few weeks I've been working on this, then swapped it out earlier today. A few hours later I get a flood in GReader of posts from Bret Taylor...the sort of thing that happens when you change blogging platforms. I don't think I've visited his site in over a year, but I go there today and see this -- http://backchannel.org - Ken Sheppardson

The existence of Disqus got me thinking I can use something like Jekyll for my blog. I'm already building the rest of my site with templates. - Amit Patel

Yeah, Disqus is slick. I'd waffled back and forth between WordPress native comments and Disqus, so moving everything over to Jekyll was trivial. Now the question is really whether to bother with comments at all. Disqus is enabled now, but it just looks kinda janky, I'm not sure I want to spend a bunch of time cleaning up the CSS, and there's something appealing about the commentless Daring Fireball approach... - Ken Sheppardson

When I visit a blog that doesn't want comments, it feels like the author doesn't want me there... - Amit Patel

Well, that's almost the case for me, but not in a negative way... I'd sorta rather have any follow-up conversations on FriendFeed, Google+, or even Twitter than squirreled away under the blog post. I'd certainly like people to see what I wrote, but after that I've got no particular interest in trying to drive page views or anything. - Ken Sheppardson

I think both styles of discussion work. Using Twitter/Google+/FriendFeed feels like people at other people's houses talking about something you made. Separate smaller, more intimate conversations. Using comments on the blog feels like inviting all those people to my house to talk to each other. A big conversation among strangers. - Amit Patel

I recently built a site for publishing some panos using Hyde. It is jekyll written in python. I used bootstrap and less along with it. Check it out: http://www.bedafamily.com. No rss or comments yet. - Joe Beda

Every few years I change what I use. This conversation is making me want to change again :-) . The last major change was to XSLT (!): http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp... + http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp... = http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp... I'm pretty happy with it but I need to hook it up to emacs so that as soon as I save the input, it regenerates the output. For my blog I'd need to add categories and RSS… - Amit Patel

I once did C++ code gen with XSLT. I regretted it. True story. - Joe Beda

Just saw this today: "Just over a month ago, I switched comments off for this blog. I wanted to post a very brief follow-up on that decision. In a nutshell, it was definitely the right move. For the first few days I did miss the validation of getting a flurry of comments on each new article, but I quickly realised that I was enjoying the peace and quiet. The other benefits are manifest: ..." - http://mattgemmell.com/2011... - Ken Sheppardson

Looks very nice, well done. I agree, I don't necessarily want discussion on my posts. Most of the time, it's just getting my thoughts out there, not really looking for input. - Nathan Snyder

Thanks, Nathan. The anti-comment faction's pretty vocal, by the way, and can be persuasive... "Let’s be totally honest here: anyone worthwhile leaving a comment should do so on their own blog. Very few read blog comments anyway. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Commenting is a facade. It makes you think you have a voice. You don’t. Get your own blog and write how you really feel on your own site." -- http://parislemon.com/post... - Ken Sheppardson