The discussion revolves around finding a minimal version of Discourse for personal blogs, particularly for a Jekyll blog. themoment is looking for a solution that addresses issues such as bloated forum posts, lack of easy navigation between the blog and forum, and prioritizing blog content over forum activity.
Falco suggests that some of these issues are by design and may be better suited for Disqus, but also mentions that some customizations can be achieved through CSS and HTML in the admin interface.
joebuhlig shares an example of a Jekyll site using Discourse for comments, where the community has taken off on its own. He notes that users don’t seem to have issues navigating between the two sites, thanks to custom links and branding.
themoment finds joebuhlig’s implementation inspiring and appreciates the flexibility of customization in Discourse, which may help solve the issues they initially raised.
The forum (in the demos I could find) repost the entire blog posts, making it bloated for people who already read it and just wanted to comment and join the discussion.
The top comments are embedded into the posts, which I like. But in order to join the discussion, you are taken to another page (which is fine) just that there is no easy way of getting back and the goal of a blog, in my opinion, is to keep people from entirely leaving the site.
What if instead of having “suggested topics” on the bottom, there was an easy way for people to go back to blog (for example, relevant articles they can read), rather than staying in the forum. As activity in the forum is second in importance to the blog.
I think I run the exact setup you’re talking about. I have a Jekyll site that uses Discourse for comments. But the community itself has started taking off on its own outside of the comments portion.
The folks there don’t have any qualms with getting to and from the two sites. They have links everywhere that take them where they want to go. Some of that is within the topics in the community but I think (and analytics confirm) the custom header I added helps a lot. I wanted the branding to feel the same across my sites so I customized Discourse to fit both my main Jekyll site and my tools site.
I don’t think I would worry about users moving between the two. I’ve never seen an issue with it.
Your implementation is great. Thanks for sharing an example.
Interestingly enough, the more time I spend using discourse, the more I like it. I think the functionality just takes getting used to. And based on your site and other sites that I’ve seen, I definitely think there is enough flexibility in the customization so that I can solve the trackback issue I had with it.