To accompany my recent handle change I took the time to upgrade this blog.
I recently upgraded this blog to Ghost 2.x and took the opportunity to abandon Disqus. It bloated the post page and came with something like 45 tracking scripts/cookies. To replace it I settled on Commento, a small and privacy-focused open source solution. The minimum subscription is $3/month, which is a bit high for a blog that I only pay $5/month for. Luckily they offer a self-hosted option. Here is how I got it setup.
Ghost's email guide leans pretty heavily on external services. It doesn't seem to think most people will want to use the server they are running on.