I’ve decided to add Disqus comments to the site. Having a blog without comments is just…not a blog. That said, I’m not particularly happy with the amount of overhead it adds to the page. My base configuration (no images, no comments) involves a total of two requests to the site for full rendering (three if you count favicon business, which I don’t). The blog is delivered via AWS S3 and CloudFront, which gives me CDN capabilities. Since I’m doing static generation, the site is pretty quick. With Disqus, my request count balloons to 33 requests with a default Disqus setup. I went through Disqus and turned off as much tracking and things as I could, but I’m still at a 26 request baseline. Hopefully there are some settings to make this more minimal, since I’m new to Disqus I haven’t seen what I can tweak.

To keep the site minimal, I’ve configured Disqus only on the full post, not the summary page. As an aside, I also don’t run any tracking software (e.g. Google Analytics). First, I don’t want the overhead, and second, I don’t care to track my readers.