Haloscan going the way of the dinosaur
Haloscan is getting upgraded to Echo:
Once presented with the upgrade message, Haloscan users will have 2 weeks to make a decision. You will have the following two options.
- Upgrade to Echo for $9.95/year – all your comment data will be transitioned over automatically
- Export your Haloscan comment data and turn off their service
This explains the recent interest in my Importing Haloscan comments into WordPress 2.3 from Blogger post (which is based on my original Importing Haloscan comments into WordPress from Blogger post from June 2005, back when I first moved from Blogger to WordPress).
It’s funny to think that in a small way I’ve helped countless users transition their Haloscan comments (usually embedded in Blogger posts) to WordPress over the past four and a half years, judging by the 203 comments that the two posts above have accumulated. Though it will be a bummer for the few users who are not able to make the transition, and thus lose their comments, I have to say it will be nice to have one less smidgen of code to support.
As an aside, I always get a chuckle out of the following image from Sam Ruby’s Rights vs Responsibilities post:
Since code costs essentially zero to distribute, my first thoughts are not on what rights I want to assert, but what obligations I wish to assume. If you look at software licenses, both commercial and open, this is something that they are careful to enumerate. In most cases, it essentially comes down to: “if it breaks, you get to keep both halves”.
I’d like to say a big thank you for that post and for sharing and supporting all the plugins. I didn’t expect it go so smoothly with WordPress 2.9 – after all it was written for 2.3 – but everything worked perfectly. All my Haloscan comments have escaped and linked up to the correct blog posts.
Not something I’d planned on doing, but at least it made me stop prevaricating and shift my blog to WordPress!
Lois, you’re welcome. Kudos for working through my old posts and rescuing your data.
Big thanks to you. All my worries [over 11,000 comments] are settled.
Yeay!
chics, as they say: woot!
Hi. I’ve been trying to figure out how to use your code to import my Haloscan into a WordPress blog. You indicate some paths to find in my WordPress accoutn, but I’m puzzled that I can’t find them there. Is that because the comments can only be imported into a WordPress.org paid blog or site, and not into a WordPress.com free blog? Thank you.
Permafrost—you are correct. My Haloscan import code only works for people who are self-hosting WordPress (downloaded from WordPress.org).
One strategy you might want to employ is to set up a local copy of a self-hosted “development” WordPress on your laptop (this is easier said than done). Import both your Haloscan comments and Blogger blog posts to it, and then export the merged posts and comments to WordPress.com.
If this is beyond your technical comfort level, I’d be happy to offer my services. Just send me an email.