Using JamComments

I recently migrated my blog from WordPress to Astro. I’m loving Astro, but it doesn’t have a built-in commenting system. Very few people comment on my blogs, but I do have a few old posts that occasionally get a worthwhile comment.

A lot of people use Disqus. It has been around for years and works with most blogging platforms. The downside is the price: $132/year per site. That isn’t a huge expense, but it does start to add up when you are trying to move a dozen or so blogs off of WordPress.

I did some searching and found JamComments. It is currently $60/year for up to 3 sites. Much better!

Even better, it already has support for Astro. I did run into a very minor issue when I first tried to add it to my Astro project, but the author quickly pushed a fix for the package.

Getting my site to rebuild after a comment is added was also easy. I created a deploy hook in Cloudflare, and added it to my JamCommments account. Now whenever comments are added, JamComments will automatically trigger a build and deploy in Cloudflare.

It does appear to be missing an import feature, so I don’t have an easy way to get my existing comments out of WordPress and into JamComments. I thought about creating a script to manually submit these comments, but then the dates would be wrong on all of them. I may have to reach out to the author and see if this is on the roadmap.

If not, I could always roll my own solution. There are a few examples out there, but I’d prefer to use a managed service.