Well, something could probably be done to automatically bounce people to the new location from this one, FWIW. So all the old links would still work. Well, the front page links at any rate. I dunno about the deep links. Something could probably be done.
When I was setting up my own blog (which I still want to return to someday, even though it's been about 5 years since I last posted), I settled on ExpressionEngine. It really is good. The core version is free, and may even meet your needs. (I went for the $100 + $20/year version.) Kim du Toit also used EE.
You'll need it hosted with an ISP. I use eChristianWebHosting.com (go figure, right? ;) ) which is actually the best host I've found yet. Their tools are excellent and current, they're extremely competent, and the prices are good. I spend $6/month for my hosting. Depending on your traffic, it might be more.
FYI, my biggest customer is using godaddy.com and he's had enough problems with them that I actively recommend avoiding them. For example, emails sent from one person to another via two accounts on the same domain (which should be the same mail server), sometimes took 5 hours to be received.
As I said in the other thread, I'm willing to help do the conversion if you can wait for me to free up some time.
According to some people, they were able to export their sites to blogger, and then import into Disqus.
(But I haven't been thrilled, either, with discqus as they run it on The Atlantic website. That said, it *works*, if annoyingly "feature filled". (like only loading so many comments, allowing the quasi-threading like Echo, etc.)
But it does work.
But the people reporting that didn't have the size of comments Kevin does. I think that it's well beyond what Echo was ever planning for.
You know I am a big fan of WordPress. I migrated my BlogSpot, including comments, over to Wordpress years ago, all by myself, although I do admit to mid-range computer skills.
So far, WordPress commenting has been pretty much impervious to spamming.
I haven't had much trouble at all with spamming. My problem is moving 40,000+ comments, intact with links. If I could do that with Blogger, I'd happily stay with Blogger, which realistically hasn't been bad at all the last three or four years.
About 5 years ago the belmont club developed problems that the blogger decided were due to the size of the archive. He ended up fixing the problem bystarting a new blog, same title but different URL, and keeping the original URL active as an archive. Are you considering this as a possibility?
Some brief research showed that blogspot is supposed to be able to export into several formats, such as WordPress, MovableType, and others. There is also apparently a converter to import MovableType entries into ExpressionEngine.
I also am a fan of WordPress. I think Blogspot allows one to indicate a forwarding URL if one moves elsewhere, so incoming links wouldn't be dead. I don't know if it can import Haloscan comments, though.
I self-host a WordPress installation with NearlyFreeSpeech.net. Costs me about $0.45/month, $0.30 of which is the private-domain-registration service. I highly recommend it. Managing everything yourself is hugely liberating.
What's wrong with the comments engine that comes with Blogger? That's what I use and it hasn't given me too many troubles.
I'm with LawDog on this one - "Magic Elf Box" and all that - but I know that I've toyed with getting off blogspot and onto my own domain, and if "www.marooned.com" were free my choice would be harder... Unless and until then, though... I'll stick with the free ice cream maker. ;)
The problem is getting my comments into blogger's commenting system. There seems to be no way to migrate from HaloScan into Blogger, much less from Echo. I don't want to lose 40,000+ comments, and I don't want to run two parallel commenting systems.
I've taken a little time to work on figuring out how to access the comments directly. So far, this is what I've figured out:
1. JavaScript doesn't access the database directly. Apparently, it makes a separate http request to get the data. They're probably running PHP on the back end to service these requests.
2. I did a data stream capture of all the data for loading the comments page of the communism thread. Apparently the comments themselves are returned as a gzip file instead of plain text.
3. The requests are apparently sent to "http://js-kit.com".
4. I think I've identified the central portion of the code that generates the request.
5. JavaScript is a lot harder to read than I'd hoped. Does anyone here have experience with it?
There is a support forum for Echo, but if the "Refund" thread(s) are any indicator, you're not the only one looking to dump Echo down a deep, dark hole.
Forum is here: http://support.js-kit.com/jskit/
Perhaps they can help you with an export function, assuming they even thought to code one (that works)...
Expression Engine is brilliant, but it takes quite a bit of work to maintain the thing (ask The Mrs. for a summary, if yer interested). I don't know what it would take to port comments over to EE, but I can't see that it would be a problem except for including the links (once again, consult The Mrs. for details).
We used pMachineHosting, and they are FANTASTIC, BRILLIANT, THE BEST. Seriously: I cannot say too many good things about them. They handled all my old site's traffic with ease, predicted when we'd have to add bandwidth, helped us with storage/archive issues etc.
Remember, at one point I was getting about 75,000 discrete visitors a day (more when I'd written something contentious), and pMachineHosting never failed us, not once.
Kim, I'm curious about kind of maintenance The Mrs. had to do. (In general. All the gory details probably aren't necessary.) I would figure software updates, running backups, and basic moderation.
Of course, having to do those things is also an advantage because you're not at the mercy of things like the {we're-gonna-do-it-to-you-and-you're-gonna-like-it---cause-you-have-no-choice} HaloScan to Echo "upgrade." I prefer stick shift to automatic transmissions for the same reason.
Except now I can see it in comment moderation, I just can't get into it to comment myself.
Abso-freaking fabulous!
Note:
All avatars and any images or other media embedded in comments were hosted on the JS-Kit website and have been lost;
references to haloscan comments have been partially automatically remapped, but accuracy is not guaranteed and corrections are solicited.
If you notice any problems with this page or wish to have your home page link updated, please contact John Hardin <jhardin@impsec.org>
JS-Kit/Echo comments for article at http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/2010/05/decisions-decisions.html (25 comments)
Tentative mapping of comments to original article, corrections solicited.
Well, something could probably be done to automatically bounce people to the new location from this one, FWIW. So all the old links would still work. Well, the front page links at any rate. I dunno about the deep links. Something could probably be done.
Or, possibly, concentration should be placed on exporting comments and transforming them into a more useful format, for import into another system.
i migrated posts and comments from blogspot to wordpress last year and it was fairly painless. 'course that was before echo.
When I was setting up my own blog (which I still want to return to someday, even though it's been about 5 years since I last posted), I settled on ExpressionEngine. It really is good. The core version is free, and may even meet your needs. (I went for the $100 + $20/year version.) Kim du Toit also used EE.
You'll need it hosted with an ISP. I use eChristianWebHosting.com (go figure, right? ;) ) which is actually the best host I've found yet. Their tools are excellent and current, they're extremely competent, and the prices are good. I spend $6/month for my hosting. Depending on your traffic, it might be more.
FYI, my biggest customer is using godaddy.com and he's had enough problems with them that I actively recommend avoiding them. For example, emails sent from one person to another via two accounts on the same domain (which should be the same mail server), sometimes took 5 hours to be received.
As I said in the other thread, I'm willing to help do the conversion if you can wait for me to free up some time.
Could you run a second commenting system going forward and leave the Echo still there?
Something like http://disqus.com/ states it works with Blogger.
According to some people, they were able to export their sites to blogger, and then import into Disqus.
(But I haven't been thrilled, either, with discqus as they run it on The Atlantic website. That said, it *works*, if annoyingly "feature filled". (like only loading so many comments, allowing the quasi-threading like Echo, etc.)
But it does work.
But the people reporting that didn't have the size of comments Kevin does. I think that it's well beyond what Echo was ever planning for.
Well, I could fire up Blogger's commenting function, but I really don't want to run two commenting systems side by side. I'd just like ONE that WORKS.
Ah, hope springs eternal!
I was asked to install Disqus when I moved my blog to the JEMS blog network.
It works well, I suppose, although most of its features are more useful to a SEO wizard or IT geek than to this simple blogger.
I've only had a few complaints.
You know I am a big fan of WordPress. I migrated my BlogSpot, including comments, over to Wordpress years ago, all by myself, although I do admit to mid-range computer skills.
So far, WordPress commenting has been pretty much impervious to spamming.
MC
I haven't had much trouble at all with spamming. My problem is moving 40,000+ comments, intact with links. If I could do that with Blogger, I'd happily stay with Blogger, which realistically hasn't been bad at all the last three or four years.
About 5 years ago the belmont club developed problems that the blogger decided were due to the size of the archive. He ended up fixing the problem bystarting a new blog, same title but different URL, and keeping the original URL active as an archive. Are you considering this as a possibility?
Yeah I would consider moving systems entirely, with the old one as an archive.
I'd really rather not. Blogger's been pretty good for the last 2-3 years, and I have seven years of content here.
Some brief research showed that blogspot is supposed to be able to export into several formats, such as WordPress, MovableType, and others. There is also apparently a converter to import MovableType entries into ExpressionEngine.
Unfortunately, the problem isn't moving the blog out of Blogspot. It's moving my HaloScan and Echo comments into something useful.
I also am a fan of WordPress. I think Blogspot allows one to indicate a forwarding URL if one moves elsewhere, so incoming links wouldn't be dead. I don't know if it can import Haloscan comments, though.
I self-host a WordPress installation with NearlyFreeSpeech.net. Costs me about $0.45/month, $0.30 of which is the private-domain-registration service. I highly recommend it. Managing everything yourself is hugely liberating.
What's wrong with the comments engine that comes with Blogger? That's what I use and it hasn't given me too many troubles.
I'm with LawDog on this one - "Magic Elf Box" and all that - but I know that I've toyed with getting off blogspot and onto my own domain, and if "www.marooned.com" were free my choice would be harder... Unless and until then, though... I'll stick with the free ice cream maker. ;)
The problem is getting my comments into blogger's commenting system. There seems to be no way to migrate from HaloScan into Blogger, much less from Echo. I don't want to lose 40,000+ comments, and I don't want to run two parallel commenting systems.
I've taken a little time to work on figuring out how to access the comments directly. So far, this is what I've figured out:
1. JavaScript doesn't access the database directly. Apparently, it makes a separate http request to get the data. They're probably running PHP on the back end to service these requests.
2. I did a data stream capture of all the data for loading the comments page of the communism thread. Apparently the comments themselves are returned as a gzip file instead of plain text.
3. The requests are apparently sent to "http://js-kit.com".
4. I think I've identified the central portion of the code that generates the request.
5. JavaScript is a lot harder to read than I'd hoped. Does anyone here have experience with it?
There is a support forum for Echo, but if the "Refund" thread(s) are any indicator, you're not the only one looking to dump Echo down a deep, dark hole.
Forum is here: http://support.js-kit.com/jskit/
Perhaps they can help you with an export function, assuming they even thought to code one (that works)...
Expression Engine is brilliant, but it takes quite a bit of work to maintain the thing (ask The Mrs. for a summary, if yer interested). I don't know what it would take to port comments over to EE, but I can't see that it would be a problem except for including the links (once again, consult The Mrs. for details).
We used pMachineHosting, and they are FANTASTIC, BRILLIANT, THE BEST. Seriously: I cannot say too many good things about them. They handled all my old site's traffic with ease, predicted when we'd have to add bandwidth, helped us with storage/archive issues etc.
Remember, at one point I was getting about 75,000 discrete visitors a day (more when I'd written something contentious), and pMachineHosting never failed us, not once.
Kim, I'm curious about kind of maintenance The Mrs. had to do. (In general. All the gory details probably aren't necessary.) I would figure software updates, running backups, and basic moderation.
Of course, having to do those things is also an advantage because you're not at the mercy of things like the {we're-gonna-do-it-to-you-and-you're-gonna-like-it---cause-you-have-no-choice} HaloScan to Echo "upgrade." I prefer stick shift to automatic transmissions for the same reason.
It looks like someone just "fixed" the thread (again) by deleting the whole thing!!! Not even Internet Exploder is loading it anymore.
@!#$#@@&##$%&*!#@&&$#!$#!*&#^%*#&^!@#$*#!*&*!^!!!!
Except now I can see it in comment moderation, I just can't get into it to comment myself.
Abso-freaking fabulous!
Note: All avatars and any images or other media embedded in comments were hosted on the JS-Kit website and have been lost; references to haloscan comments have been partially automatically remapped, but accuracy is not guaranteed and corrections are solicited.
If you notice any problems with this page or wish to have your home page link updated, please contact John Hardin <jhardin@impsec.org>