How the Triple Pat website works

The website is a static website, built with 11ty, and hosted in Google Cloud. Also running on this server is an instance of the Triple Pat check-in server, and the main instance of the Triple Pat user service. These three systems, as well as the monitoring system, are all behind an nginx web server which takes care of routing requests appropriately.

When building a website, and especially a blog, there's a real question: do I want to have comments? People love comments (mostly), but it's hard to add "just a little dynamism" to a website without opening up a huge can of worms. We could have used Disqus (which is a cool service! this is not anti-Disqus, in fact they are the only recommended viable alternative to what we did!), but instead we did something a little funky: we made the comments section be Bluesky threads! Thanks to Aendra Rininsland's blue-comments library, we can add comments to our website with minimal fuss, and we get notified of new comments as if we were chatting on Bluesky, because we are!

I think it's a really nice system, because we can have the comments section be 100% Javascript powered, and then Bluesky takes care of user identity, moderation, and all of the challenges that are implicit in social apps:

If we start getting bad actors in the comments, Bluesky's well-functioning block system means that those comments can be easily removed from view.
We won't miss a comment, because every comment is a social media notification.
People are in control of their own words. If they want to delete their comments they can do that on Bluesky and the comment will disappear from the website.

We use a social website to empower the social act of commenting, and they then take care of letting people be in control of their own words and identities. We take care of the thing being talked about. It's a good separation of concerns.

The only downside is that we have to have the blog conversations a little more publicly (Bluesky threads are a little more publicized than a chat in the comments on a blog, but not much more), but the shift in context is not too radical, and I think it's a good tradeoff for a small blog like this.