Commenting via Utterances

So I set up a commenting system for my blog today—as you can see in the bottom of the blog posts (as well as the index page). It is based on Utterances, a GitHub based comment system. The basic idea is that all my comments are linked to a (public) GitHub repo and it creates and maintains comments using GitHub Issues—each page corresponds to a GitHub issue. By doing so commenting experience is identical to writing on GitHub, which is nice! Plus all the data are just stored at the GitHub repo, which you can actually backup locally, e.g. via backup-github-repo.

Writing math in comments

What if you want to comment on my posts using math (which is not unlikely due to what I write)? I found a trick to again reuse some infrastructure from GitHub from this gist. The basic idea is that since Jupyter notebooks uses a GitHub API to render math and you can use it directly as well by writing HTML codes. For example,

<img src="https://render.githubusercontent.com/render/math?math=e^{i \pi} = -1">

renders you $e^{i \pi} = -1$ (this is not rendered by my $\LaTeX$ but by the actual HTML code). Can you see any difference to this locally $\LaTeX$ generated one: $e^{i \pi} = -1$ ?

Try it out by yourself!