So I think I found a pretty good system for allowing people to comment on stuff in the lab. Commenter Erik pointed me to this post:
http://ivanzuzak.info/2011/02/18/github-hosted-comments-for-github-hosted-blogs.html
TL;DR – Create a github issue for each sketch. Link to that from the sketch. People can comment on the issue. Brilliantly simple. I made the system a bit simpler than described in that article. I’m not pulling in the comments to the sketch page, just linking to it.
I actually had set up Disqus to open up in a overlay div. It worked fine, but I wasn’t super happy with it. It was like, the site is here, the content is here, the source code is here, and the comments are … way over here on this other unrelated site.
With the github solution, the site is here, the content is here, the source code is here and right along in the same package are the comments.
It’s a bit more work for me. I have to create the sketch, then create the issue, add the sketch url to the issue, and add the issue url to the sketch. The template I have for sketches handles most of the boilerplate because everything is indexed to the sketch date in the format YYMMDD. But the issue url will be sequentially numbered, so the issue will need to be created and then the url added to the sketch html. Not a big deal. But the Disqus method was 100% automated. 🙂
Anyway, hopefully this will allow a decent way for people to comment, discuss, ask questions, etc.
Another thought would be to create a new git repo for each experiment. The repo README could show off that experiment and then issues, branches, and possible PRs would be just for that experiment.
Just bear in mind there will potentially be hundreds of these. I think the issue-per-experiment is going to work out.
You can create the issue using the API, it returns the location of the issue: https://developer.github.com/v3/issues/#create-an-issue
oh, nice. thanks!