This looks awesome. I'd been considering implementing a DIY comment system in React [1] but this is appears to be much nicer as it keeps the site and comments in the same repo.

I'd be interested in testing this out with GitHub Pages. Just out of curiosity, are there any cloud providers that will host this for free? Heroku's free tier doesn't appear to run 24/7.

[1]: http://facebook.github.io/react/docs/tutorial.html

RedHat's OpenShift have a good free plan, but they idle your app if you don't get 1 HTTP request per 24 hours, then they start it when you get that request. If they keep the HTTP request on wait until the app start on that first HTTP request it would be cool, but I don't know, they say it doesn't affect at all so maybe they do that.

Thanks a lot for the suggestion. I had heard of OpenShift but have never paid much attention to RedHat. It turns out OpenShift has an official Node.js "gear" so between that and easy access via SSH and a git repo it was a breeze to set up. I'm still a little sure how the idling works, but looks good so far.

I did something like this for webmentions: http://jekmentions.alhur.es/

It's a simple backend (so you don't need your own). It could well be done for comments (someone hosting the backend for free on Heroku or something like that).

So you need a backend for the comment system processing.

Not a viable solution if you use gh-pages.

You must have it separated on your server and the comments will be added to the gh-pages on GitHub since Jekyll won't allow you to do Dynamic stuff. It's the most viable it can get.

I wanted to something like this! You beat me, congrats!