Haloscan has powered the comments on this blog almost since its inception in 2004.
Although I haven't received one yet, apparently emails are going out announcing the cancellation of the service and the impending loss of all comments unless you either a) download them for posterity; or b) upgrade to Echo, Haloscan's subscription-based successor. I really appreciate the notification in a prompt and timely manner.
Well, that's not happening. I really don't get enough comments to justify what a pay service demands($10/month), which would be something like charging me 50 cents a comment. Even though Haloscan was the only game in town back in 2004, that's not the case anymore: in addition to Blogger's native comment system, there's also Intense Debate, Disqus, and I'm sure plenty of other free services that will work for this tiny little blog. My big concern is losing all the great input from you guys since the beginning....yeah even you David!
So, at some point in the very near future, commenting on this blog will change. I'm looking at Disqus as it appears that they have some method of rescuing the old comments from Haloscan and it seems like a pretty robust system and it is free (for now). Meanwhile, Haloscan lets users export comments in something called CAIF (Common Announcement Interchange Format) and I have done this for all 8,000 comments made on the site since the beginning up until yesterday.
So if you come in here in the next couple of days and it is totally fried and comments don't work or they do and are completely different then you know why. The first step will be to disable Haloscan and revert to the native Blogger I guess but until I get into the conversion I really don't know. I know just enough about HTML to be dangerous so who knows what will happen.
1 comment:
I am moderately happy with Echo from JS-Kit, the successor to Haloscan. It has its moments of flakery, but it also was able to import all the old comments from Haloscan going back to the first post.
YMMV.
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