---
title: Announcing Carnival for your Site
teaser: 'Announcing Carnival: an unobtrusive, developer-friendly way to add comments
  to any site.

  '
tags: news,web,haskell,carnival
author: Pat Brisbin
published_on: 2015-04-17
---

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.

![carnival.gif](https://images.thoughtbot.com/announcing-carnival-for-your-site/carnival.gif)

## Open source

Carnival is a paid service, but still completely [open source][source]. That
means you can see how it works, track progress, report bugs, and request
features directly in [GitHub][issues]. 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][sites] 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:

```html
<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][issues] what you're looking for.

[carnival]: https://carnivalapp.io
[ifttt]: https://ifttt.com/
[issues]: https://github.com/thoughtbot/carnival/issues
[sign up]: https://carnivalapp.io/auth/login
[sites]: https://carnivalapp.io/sites
[source]: https://github.com/thoughtbot/carnival
[zapier]: https://zapier.com/