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Chronicle supports the submission of comments upon published posts, via an optional CGI script.

This document describes how you would go about enabling this support.

Introduction

The basic use of chronicle is to convert a collection of text files into a HTML & RSS blog.

There are two ways this software is typically used:

  • On a single host.
    • The blog input is stored upon your web-server and you generate the output directly to a HTTP-accessible directory upon that machine.
  • With multiple hosts.
    • The blog input lives upon one machine, and once you've generated the output you copy it over to a remote web-server where it may be viewed.

Depending upon which of these ways you use the software the comment support will need to be handled differently.

Common Setup

Install the included file cgi-bin/comments.cgi upon the web-server which hosts the blog, and adjust the settings at the start of that file to specify the basic configuration:

  • The local directory to save the comments within.

  • The source and destination email addresses to use for notification purposes.

From here the configuration varies depending on how you're going to run the software.

Single Machine

If you have only a single machine then you may configure the comments.cgi script to save the comments in text files directly within your blog tree.

Assuming you have something like this:

  • comments/
    • The directory to contain the comments.
  • data/
    • The directory where your blog posts are loaded from.

You may then regenerate your blog via:

 chronicle --input=./date/  --comments=./comments/ --output=/var/www/blog/

This will ensure that the comments saved by your web-server into the comments directory are included in the (re)generated blog.

Multiple Machines

If you have the blog input files upon machine "local" and the hosted blog upon the machine "remote" then you will run into problems:

  • The comments are saved by your web-server to a local directory upon the machine "remote".
  • To rebuild the blog upon your local machine, "local", you must have those files.

The solution is to generate your blog in a three-step process:

  1. Copy the comment files, if any, from "remote" to "local".
  2. Rebuild the blog.
  3. Upload the generated blog.

I'd recommend using rsync for steps 1 & 3.