It's been on the cards for a while, but I've finally done it. I've moved!I've been using self-hosted Wordpress for my professional blog and it's just so nice to use, I love it, but moving my three-legged cat blog to a new home seemed like too much trouble, so I left it where it was and prevaricated. I'm good at that.
Enter Haloscan/JS-Kit/Echo. Things have been rumbling on over there for a while, but the bottom line is that it's finally decision time. I haven't had my 'pay up or clear off' email yet, but it's only a matter of time.
It's not the prospect of paying for a service that bothers me, that's fair enough (and I did originally pay for Haloscan). The problem is that I'm simply not won over by Echo's commenting system - I've tried it on a couple of sites and it's slow and a bit lacking in user friendliness. I've always used Haloscan because I wanted something really simple.
I'd probably have stayed with Blogger, but unfortunately as far as I can tell, no-one has created a method for moving comments from Haloscan into Blogger.
However, I did have a Baldrick moment. I formed a cunning plan. Oh yes.
My cunning plan involved pulling all my posts across to a temporary Wordpress blog and using these instructions to grab all my Haloscan comments. That bit worked like a dream.
Then all I had to do was import everything back here, via a quick bit of trickery (because Blogger doesn't seem to want to talk to the other blog platforms) and all would be well. Except it wasn't. That bit did not work. Not at all.
So I found myself with a perfectly functioning Wordpress blog, with all my comments. I also have a perfectly functioning Blogger blog, soon to be without all my comments (unless I sign up for Echo, or Disqus). Should I give up on the comments and stay with Blogger? No, I think that was the push I needed to go it alone.
So I've moved. Please feel free to visit me at my new home: www.three-legged-cat.co.uk
I'm giving it a day or two, then I'm going to attempt to set up a bit of magical redirection, which should whisk you away to my new home automatically. Assuming that I'm better at redirecting than I was at importing. Time will tell.
See you soon - I hope!
(Incidentally, since my comments will shortly vanish from Haloscan, I've removed the comment links from this site. If you want to leave a comment on this post, you'll have to do that over here.)
Photo: Cardboard Box by ahhyeah. Used under Creative Commons Licence.
