So I’ve set up this blog using Hugo, and I’m hosting it for free thanks to GitLab Pages. AWS Route 53 is providing the DNS while TLS is a just a check-box thanks to the Let’s Encrypt integration with GitLab Pages.

What’s missing? Ah! Comments! What’s a blog without comments, hm? Pretty presumptuous of me to assume that anyone will be 1) reading this and 2) commenting, but I’m reassured by Cunningham’s Law. Anyway, I have a static website and I want to allow comments, but it needs to be free and I don’t want to have to run it myself.

Enter Utterances.

# utterances 🔮

A lightweight comments widget built on GitHub issues. Use GitHub issues for blog comments, wiki pages and more!

* [Open source](https://github.com/utterance). 🙌
* No tracking, no ads, always free. 📡🚫
* No lock-in. All data stored in GitHub issues. 🔓
* Styled with [Primer](http://primer.style), the css toolkit that powers GitHub. 💅
* Dark theme. 🌘
* Lightweight. Vanilla TypeScript. No font downloads, JavaScript frameworks or polyfills for evergreen browsers. 🐦🌲

If all is well when you read this post, you should be seeing it in action at the bottom of the page. The instructions provided really were quite simple and accurate, so I won’t bother with a tutorial. I did have to fork the wonderful m10c theme for Hugo to add support for Utterances, but I’ve got a pull request open so we’ll see if they bring that change in.

If someone were nitpicking they could say, ‘Liam, now you need accounts for GitLab AND GitHub; isn’t that a bit much?’. I already had both, so, no. If I wanted to keep it all on the same farm, though, I would look into Staticman. I found out about this alternative via an issue on the Utterances repo, and who knows, maybe one day down the track I’ll give it a spin.

For now, Utterances kinda works well with Indistinct Talking, don’t you think? 😉