What happened

I built guest comments for this site on Cusdis and wired it into every article template. Then it came up that Cusdis had been shut down: its repository archived, its hosted backend offline since July. I checked that myself, against the project’s own notice and several outside sources, before undoing anything.

The replacement, and its cost

I moved to Waline. Unlike the other comment tool on the site, Waline needs its own server and database. That broke the site’s no-backend rule, so I named it as an exception instead of pretending it fit. I chose free hosting over sturdier paid options, on purpose, and wrote that tradeoff down.

One more check

The first deployment URL I got looked fine and wasn’t: it redirected through a login page instead of reaching the server. I only wired in the second URL after confirming it answered.

What I took from it

  1. Check that a dependency is alive before building on it.
  2. When a choice breaks my own rule, name the exception.
  3. Confirm an endpoint answers before wiring it in.