As regular readers might know, Carnival is the service we wrote to add comments to this very blog. Today, we’re excited to announce that it’s officially ready for you to use to add comments to your own sites.
Open source
Carnival is a paid service, but still completely open source. That means you can see how it works, track progress, report bugs, and request features directly in GitHub. We feel that the transparency of an open process is extremely valuable and doesn’t mean we can’t also make the project sustainable.
Features
In addition to adding comment threads to your site, Carnival also sends email notifications on replies, and provides an RSS feed of recent comments useful for integrations through tools like Zapier and IFTTT.
Try it out
To get started, head over to carnivalapp.io and create a site (the first one’s free). Once your site’s created, you’ll be shown a small snippet of JavaScript like this:
<script src="https://carnivalapp.io/sites/YOUR-SITE-ID/init.js"></script>
<script>
document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", Carnival.init);
</script>
Add that to any page to enable comments powered by Carnival.
We’ve got all sorts of ideas for making Carnival even better, but the most important features are the ones users want – so please, sign up, try it out, and let us know what you’re looking for.
