When I first started blogging many years ago, I used the Blogger platform, which I imported to my own domain using FTP (so that anyone reading my blog would see it as www.chipbennett.net). At the time, Blogger's commenting system was rather rudimentary, so I opted to use a third-party comment management system called Haloscan.
Interestingly, due to developments over the past couple of months, had I stuck with this arrangement, I would be in serious trouble. Recently, Haloscan was bought by Echo, which has announced that Haloscan is being discontinued in a matter of days. Likewise, Blogger has recently announced that it is discontinuing support for FTP importing of Blogger-hosted blogs to third-party domains.
Fortunately, I long ago left Blogger for the infinitely better self-hosted WordPress. Thus, even though Blogger has implemented a replacement service - their Custom Domains feature - and therefore the change would be minor, I don't have to worry about it at all.
More problematic, however, is the announced discontinuation of the Haloscan commenting system. When I first moved to WordPress, I continued to use Haloscan, which I had been using on Blogger. At some point, I decided to make the jump to native WordPress comments - but I still had several hundred comments hosted by Haloscan.
At the time, I was unable to export those comments from Haloscan, as such exports required the purchase of a Haloscan Pro account. So, I modified my blog theme to account for the old Haloscan comments, and kept a hybrid system.
Now, however, with the announced discontinuation of Haloscan, my hand was forced. Fortunately, Echo offered the option of converting to a (paid) Echo account, or exporting Haloscan comments. I quickly exported my comments, as I had no desire to pay for something that I was doing natively from within WordPress.
Thus, the problem became one of how to import several hundred comments into my WordPress database? Fortunately, this script came to the rescue, with a slight modification provided by the script developer. Using the provided script and the export.xml file provided by the Haloscan export, I seamlessly pulled all of my several hundred Haloscan comments into my WordPress database.
If you find yourself facing the same situation, the above script should help you as well.
Importing Blogger-Integrated Haloscan Comments
If you need to import Blogger-integrated Haloscan comments into your WordPress installation, follow the instructions provided by the script author, at the above link.
Importing WordPress-Integrated Haloscan Comments
If you, like I did, integrated your Haloscan comments directly into your WordPress installation, do the following:
- Download the script.
- Replace lines 77-81 of the script with the following code:
$meta_records = $wpdb->get_results("select * from $wpdb->posts");
foreach ($meta_records as $meta_record) {
$blogger_to_wordpress[$meta_record->ID] = $meta_record->ID;
} - Upload the modified script file to www.domain.com/wordpress/wp-admin/ (where domain.com is your domain name)
- Export your existing Haloscan comments by logging into your Haloscan account and following the instructions provided.
- Upload the resulting export.xml file to www.domain.com/wordpress/
- Using your browser, go to www.domain.com/wordpress/wp-admin/import-haloscan.php
- Click the "OK" button to perform the import.
If your experience is like mine, you may get an error regarding a malformed XML file, due to its encoding. There are various options for rectifying the problem, but in my case, I just went to the line in export.xml indicated by the error message, and replaced the non-UTF-8 characters (in my case, fancy quote marks) with valid characters, and re-ran the script. Everything worked flawlessly at that point.
