Warning to regular readers of this blog: SEVERE Nerd Alert.

A lot of folks I know who started their blogs out on Blogger have used HaloScan for commenting since before Blogger implemented comments. Since HaloScan is shutting down in the next few days, you’d think you might want to move all your old comments to Blogger.

Good luck.

There’s really no practical reason why someone at Blogger can’t write some sort of comments parser to handle the XML files that HaloScan spits out, but so far, they haven’t. If you want to get it done right now, the only way I found to make it work is a ridiculously cumbersome process.

Basically, that process is to import everything into a WordPress blog where it can all be properly combined, then re-export it, run it through python script, and upload it back into Blogger.

I’ve decided to write up the entire procedure I went through both as an exercise in writing documentation and in order to help anyone else who’s crazy enough to want to try this. If you think you have the patience for this (or would just like to see exactly how insane I am), hit the “read the rest” link that follows.

Read the rest…