Checking Haloscan forums, I have found out that exporting comments from there is not possible (other than manually saving each comment, something only Jonathan has the patience for). However, according to them,
This is currently impossible. It willl likely be coded in about a month from now but for now, exporting can’t be done.
So, there might be hope. I think I’ll wait a month.
Way back when I was using Blogger, I had comments by YACCS. There is a way to import them to MT but it’s not supported by MT or by YACCS so I didn’t trust it enough to use it. I still have the YACCS account, so the old comments are still around, they’re just not attached to anything right now.
I had only been blogging for a couple months before I switched to MT so I haven’t really missed the old comments. If MT had a way to edit the date and time on which the comments have been posted, I might take the time to copy and paste the old comments in and then edit the info. Maybe this will be a feature in upcoming versions of MT.
It looks like the “remember me” cookie is not working. I had this same problem when I first started.
Here’s the MT support forums thread where I found out how to fix it:
http://www.movabletype.org/support/index.php?act=ST&f=14&t=6482&s=4d97b8f4fe42e8153f4c0d30e2a3a355
I have more than 400 comments on Haloscan. I would like to retrieve them if possible, even if the date is wrong.
Regarding the remembering info, that’s what I get for following your mt.* subdomain idea!
Al-Muhajabah: Thanks for the tip. Now let’s see if this works.
Another try.
Ok, it works now, Al-Muhajabah. But I had to hard-code it which I hate. Is there any other solution? I tried using the MTCGIPATH tag which has only an extra / at the end, but that didn’t work.
Yeah, it was because of the mt.zackvision.com subdomain for the comments. If I had known ahead of time you were copying that, I would have warned you. 😉
To get around hand-coding it, there are several possibilities.
You could try changing the site URL in Weblog Config so that it’s just zackvision.com and see if that works.
The default template should have used the MTBlogHost tag, which would return http://www.zackvision.com with no http:// at the beginning. I think that MTCGIPath includes http:// at the beginning. I’m not sure if you can change it in mt.cfg to leave that off. If you’re feeling brave you can give it a try and hope that it doesn’t screw everything up.
If you want to get really creative, you could create a template module that just has mt.zackvision.com as the contents, then use MTInclude to pull it into your comments template. All you would have to do if you ever change your domain name is to edit the template module.
I might even be able to think of some way to use an MT plugin to do the job.
In case the Site URL tip isn’t clear, you probably have something there like
http://www.zackvision.com/weblog
If you change it to
http://zackvision.com/weblog
then the MTBlogHost tag might pick up zackvision.com from it (instead of http://www.zackvision.com as it’s doing now). As the support forum thread indicated, this ought to work no matter where you put it.
A-M: Thanks. I haven’t tried it yet. I guess it will have to wait until I return.
Haloscan offers an XML/RSS version of the comments. Can it be used for importing them?
Miranda: The RSS is only of the last 10 comments.