@sckott @karthik Just came across this guide on using Discourse on static sites: http://eviltrout.com/2014/01/22/embedding-discourse.html
Not sure if this is a good idea (writing this post as much to test out the system as anything) but seems like we could replace our Disqus comments with comments hosted through Discourse instead. Thoughts?
If nothing else, it would facilitate markdown (including syntax-highlighted fenced code blocks) in comments:
library("ggplot2")
1 + 1
nice.
How would we port over existing disqus comments?
Also aren’t both owned/built by the same people? Jeff something or other.
@karthik I think Jeff is behind SO and Discourse, but not Disqus AFAIK.
@cboettig This looks promising for sure. Seems worth trying, though I agree I don’t want to lose current comments…
@karthik @scott Disqus has an XML-formatted export, but afaik you’d be on
your own after that to extract the XML and repost them with the discourse
API?
Perhaps a simpler alternative is just to leave Disqus on the current posts
and tweak the Jekyll templates such that old posts still display the Disqus
block but new posts show the Discourse block? (should be just a matter of
renaming some Jekyll template files…)
@cboettig good idea to simply have new posts have Discourse comments. Could even have all posts that don’t currently have any comments go with Discourse, but maybe just new posts?
p.s. sorry, but my username here is sckott, weird, but in keeping with my github username 
Just my 2 cents: Having checked out the eviltrout site, this doesn’t seem like a great system for comments. A new user arriving at the site doesn’t see a comment box - they get a link to the discourse forum, which they have to sign up for, and then end up in a forum that doesn’t look anything like the original blog post. It’s not really an intuitive way to comment on the post at hand.
@noamross Good points. We haven’t changed, and we may not, just thinking about it. We definitely don’t want to make it harder to comment, but at the same time Disqus doesn’t seem to want to support markdown, sadface
yup, I agree with @noamross – I think the discourse embedding would need a
bit more polish first (e.g. a disqus-like javascript window to edit in
rather than a link)