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.

I will warn you that there’s a pretty decent degree of difficulty on this: There is at least some command line usage involved. There is setting up of a local host on your computer (albeit a dead-easy to use one). There is a LOT of trial and error in this process, and you have to be comfortable with recognizing when things just didn’t work and you need to start over, or at least take several steps back.

This is also very time consuming. The main reason I had time to futz with all this is that I am currently unemployed.

Also, be sure to read this all the way through these instructions and check out the known issues before you get started. There might be a dealbreaker in there, and I’d really hate for anyway to get halfway through this ridiculous process and realize that they wasted half a day for something they can’t use.

I’d like to say up front that this would absolutely not be possible without the work of Justin Watt (you’ll see why in steps 4/6), and if this works, you should totally donate to his beer fund.

If you can accept all those caveats, here are the instructions I’ve put together based on how I got this to (finally) work. I’ve tried to make it as clear as possible, but some of this stuff gets pretty complicated.

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Step 1: Install XAMPP on your computer.

XAMPP is a free local server with PHP and MySQL tools built right into it, and which works on Windows, OS X, and Linux (and Solaris if you REALLY want to get out there).

You can also run it as a webserver, but for the purposes of this set of instructions, I’m actually keeping it off-line so that the blog I’m doing this on for a friend of mine remains unpublished (since he only allows selected readers on Blogger).

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Step 2: Install Wordpress on your XAMPP Local Host.

Great set of instructions here for Windows XP. The main difference for setting it up for OS X is actually in the installation of XAMPP, which the XAMPP website covers pretty simply. Note that when you’re in Applications > XAMPP folder, you’ll see a shortcut to the “htdocs” folder that you’ll want to dump all the Wordpress stuff into.

One thing I did notice when I did a Get Info on it is that the “htdocs” folder is marked read-only for “everyone”, and you’ll want to make sure it’s marked read/write so that your XAMPP server can access it.* On the Mac, hit command-I to Get Info on the folder, then at the bottom of the window that opens up you’ll see dropdown menus that will allow you to change the permissions easily.

*- Again, I’m assuming you will NOT be putting the WordPress workaround on the Web, because there are huge security issues with marking a file as read/write for everyone on a live server, and I would STRONGLY recommend against doing this if you’re working with a live server.

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On the sidebar of WordPress’s admin page, there’s a Tools > Import feature, and one of the types of blogs you can choose is Blogger. You’ll have to sign in with your Google Account to authorize the import, but once you’ve done that, the rest of the process is automated.

I encountered two minor issues with the importer. The first was that there were about 15 or so posts that didn’t come over, which had to be manually re-added. Out of 2300, I was pretty much okay with that, but going through and figuring out which posts were missed was kind of a pain in the ass.

The second issue was that for some reason the WordPress tool to import from Blogger pulled an extra “>” in at the beginning of every. single. post. from a BlogSpot blog. It’s a little annoying, but it’s also kind of good as an indicator of what posts have been imported and/or reimported.

I will note – about a year ago I imported the blog you’re reading now to WordPress from a Blogger blog about I’d been publishing via FTP for years, and didn’t have the “>” issue. Don’t know if it’s a new bug in the import tool or if it’s something to do with BlogSpot, but the issue was there.

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Step 4: Make sure all your Blogger posts have the Post Number somewhere in them.

The easiest way to do that is to go into your Blogger template add the following bit of code in right after the <$BlogItemBody$> string:

<font color=”[your blog's background color]“>postID=<$BlogItemNumber$></font>

Making it the same color as your background will make it visible to the script that needs to pull the post ID number, but invisible to anyone actually looking at your site (unless they happen to highlight it). I tried doing this as an anchor but the script wasn’t able to pull it, it’s got to be right in the actual post.

If you don’t mind the postID for every post being visible to your readers while you perform all this nonsense, you can just put in postID=<$BlogItemNumber$> .

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This page has two totally invaluable PHP scripts for this process written by Justin Watt: “wp-get-blogger-post-IDs” and “import-haloscan.” Run step 2 in that page’s instructions to download, install, and run the “wp-get-blogger-post-IDs” script. This will pull in all your post IDs that you set up a minute ago so that the comments can be matched to the appropriate post.

Here’s the bad news if you have a protected blog: You WILL have to make your Blogger blog temporarily available to anyone if it’s not already through the Settings > Permissions tab on Blogger.

You don’t have to allow any search engine indexing or anything, it just takes the “this blog is open to invited readers only” wall down temporarily, so unless someone knows your URL and specifically goes to look at it in the short bit where the wall is down, there’s nothing to be concerned about.

The good news is that Blogger automatically preserves your readers list so that the second you’re done getting all the info you need, you can immediately turn that protection back on.

NOTE: I did notice when running the PHP scripts on the XAMPP local server that that they can be a little slow, so your wall of protection may need to be down for up to an hour or more, depending on how many posts you have.

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Step 6: Put your HaloScan Export files in the “htdocs/wordpress” file and number them sequentially.

If you have more than one HaloScan export file, go ahead and number them sequentially so they can be imported as “export1.xml”, “export2.xml”. Then place those files in your main htdocs/wordpress file.

I will note, when I imported 1400 comments to over 2 exports to this blog via WordPress, it did it just fine, but it choked on trying to import all 8,000+ comments at once on the blog I’m working with on this giant mess.

For my friend’s blog, I wound up just importing each export file one at a time, throwing all the others in a folder I marked “exports” so I knew where they were, but the script would ignore them. You can keep them numbered sequentially so you can keep track of which ones you’ve already imported, just only have one at a time in the main “wordpress” folder.

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Step 7: Run import-haloscan.php.

Remember this page where you got the “wp-get-blogger-post-IDs” script? Well, the second script on that page, import-haloscan.php, is the second piece of this, located in that page’s Step 3. Follow that page’s instructions on how to download, install, and run that script.

The “import-haloscan” script takes all the post IDs you brought in and matches them up with the comments in your HaloScan Export file(s).

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Step 8: Check and make sure your comments imported correctly.

Make sure the number of comments you imported for each post matches up. You may have a very few missing comments – When I did it for this blog, I lost 7 out of around 1400 comments, and frankly, I’d rather have 99.5% than none.

However, if you’re missing a ton of comments, then you might want to try deleting all the comments (which can be done in bulk from the “comments” tab on the sidebar) and reimporting each export file one at a time.

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Step 9: Export from Wordpress.

Now that you’ve gotten all your posts and comments linked up and in one place, it’s time to start getting them back over to Blogger.

Go to Tools > Export, and hit the “Download Export File” button. All your posts and their comments will export as a big XML file to your default download directory.

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Step 10: Download the Google Blog Converters App Engine.

The Data Liberation Front has put together a series of Python scripts that will translate the XML WordPress puts out into something that Blogger can understand. You can download a big old folder of scripts from their Google Code page.

Note that you do need to have a recent version of Python installed for it to work, but most recent OS’s come with a version that will work pre-installed. If you don’t have Python installed, here’s a link to the Python site which will give you more info on how to make that happen.

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Step 11: Fire up your command line.

On OS X, Terminal works fantastically for this because you can just drag and drop the files you need.

Once Terminal is up and running, drag the “wordpress2blogger.sh” script from the “bin” file in the big downloaded file o’scripts into the terminal window. You’ll see a plus sign to let you know that the script is able to be added, and then the script’s name will just show up in the window.

Then, drag in the XML document that exported from WordPress into the terminal window using the same procedure. Once both are added, hit enter. The script will think for a minute, then spit out an enormous amount of text into the terminal window.

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Step 12: Create the document to upload to Blogger.

Edited to add 02.18.10: Excellent tip from Kevin in the comments that will allow you to skip part of this step:

When executing the command line version, you can automatically capture the terminal output instead of letting it scroll by and then re-selecting/editing. On any *nix system like OSX or linux you just redirect the output into a file with “>”.

sh wordpress2blogger.sh > mynewfile.txt

Back to our regular programming….

In Terminal, go to Shell > Export Text As. This will export everything in the Terminal window as a .txt file. However, you’ll need to go in and do a couple things before it’s ready for upload. If you’re using another command line interface, you can also just do a select all on all text and paste it into a blank document.

Open this .txt document in your favorite text Editor – I prefer TextWrangler because it’s got an option to soft-wrap text so you don’t have to scroll sideways for miles.

At the top of the document, select everything before the “<?xml version=’1.0′…” and delete it, since that’s just stuff that was only relevant to the terminal.

Go down to the very bottom of the document, and make sure you delete the “[your username]’s-Computer:~ [your username]$”. This is also only something that is useful to the Terminal.

Once you have deleted both of these items, do a Save As… and make sure to save it as a .xml file, and use a name that will allow you to distinguish it as the file that needs to be uploaded to Blogger, like “Wordpress Export For Upload To Blogger.xml”.

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Step 13: Upload the file to Blogger…in a test blog.

I would strongly, strongly recommend setting up a test blog before you re-upload everything to your main blog, since in order to do so, you’re basically going to have to nuke your main blog.

I set up a test blog on BlogSpot that I restricted so that only my friend and I could see it, then uploaded the XML file generated in Step 12. This allowed me to check that all the posts and comments had made it over – Which was good because the first time I tried it, I realized I’d screwed something up and managed to only import comments prior to 2004, and had to go back several steps.

If your upload succeeds and everything looks good in your test blog…

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Step 14: Backup, then nuke the content on your main Blogger Blog.

Again, I cannot emphasize enough: Backup, backup, backup. Things go sideways. You want a backup of everything. To backup your Blogger Blog, go to Settings > Basic and at the top there’s a link to Export Blog. Click that, and then click the big old button that says “Download Blog.”

Make sure you note where that file is and possibly rename it something like “Backed up main blog” so you can find it if things go wrong.

Once you have that file completely downloaded, you will need to delete all your existing posts so that you don’t wind up with either a) duplicates or b) posts with comments which won’t import because they were marked as duplicates.

To do this go to Posting > Edit Posts. Click on Select All, and you’ll be told that you’ve selected all the visible posts on the screen, and asked if you’d like to select all [however many] posts you have. Click to select all [however many] of your posts, then scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click “Delete Selected.”

Your template will be unaffected, this will just get rid of all your content (Don’t panic, we’re bringing it back in with…)

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Step 15: Upload the file to your main Blogger blog.

If you got it working for your test blog, this should work for your main blog. You may have to remove some residual HaloScan commenting code (and add some Blogger code back in) from your template to get all the comments to show up properly, but you should be good to go, except for the Known Issues listed below.

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KNOWN ISSUES

1. This only works with comments that have actually been exported by HaloScan – Once you’ve upgraded to Echo, it spits out a totally different type of XML file that cannot be read by the “import-haloscan” script and unfortunately I’m not enough of a code monkey yet to remedy this myself.

2. The Python parser to go from the exported WordPress to your Blogger re-upload seems to only parse the GMT dates/times that WP spits out, not the actual times stuff was posted (the WP-generated export file contains both pieces of data). Depending on where you live, you can wind up with all your posts up to 12 hours off. For me and my friend, this wasn’t a big issue, but for some people whose blogs are more timestamp-sensitive, this may be a dealbreaker.

3. If you have a blog with a restricted readership, be sure to note that in Step 5 you will need to make it temporarily available to everyone.

4. Two minor issues with WordPress’s Blogger Import tool (failing to import a very few old posts; randomly adding a “>” to every single imported post from BlogSpot) are detailed in Step 3.

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Phew.

I am absolutely open to suggestions of how I could have done this more easily, but I did quite a bit of digging around and couldn’t even find instructions for a process this ridiculous and cumbersome, let alone anything simpler.

Hope this helps a few people out, or at least inspires the folks at Blogger to finally put together a HaloScan comment importer. Because this method is completely insane.

Rain in L.A. somehow seems much more depressing and draining than rain anywhere else, probably because it’s always sunny here and the change of pace is so much more severe.

So between the illness and the rain, I’ve been tempted many times these last few weeks to just curl up on my couch and sleep the day away. Some days, I manage to fight the urge and actually get up and get a load or two of laundry done.

But more often than not the last couple of weeks, Chaplin will jump up on me, and either curl up between my feet or on my chest. The power of a sleeping cat is utterly ridiculous when it comes to draining me of any ability to stay awake. He’s like a purring hot water bottle.

I can sleep 10 hours a night and if I don’t snap myself out of it, I’ll still nap another two hours with the kitty. Which is exactly what happened last night and this afternoon.

I’ve mostly only been getting out to go to the gym recently, and I think I need to make sure I keep changing things up a bit more in order to prevent myself from literally sleeping my life away.

The first thing I need to do is get back to dragging myself to the gym in the morning rather than the afternoon – I always have way more energy after the gym, and am consequently way better at fighting off cat-induced sleepiness.

I also think I need to increase the time I spend away from my apartment, even though it may increase the danger of me spending money. That’s been my primary unemployment excuse for never leaving the house: Staying in is almost always cheaper than doing anything other than bike riding outside.

I’m at the point where I’m so averse to spending money that I can’t really bring myself to go to the local coffeehouse or sandwich shop and gank their wifi just for a change of scenery, because I’ll be tempted to at least order a hideously overpriced beverage if not a sandwich that costs more than I have budgeted for my entire day’s worth of meals.

So I think it’s time for me to hit up my friendly local parks and maybe go sit and get my reading-learning done out by the ocean when it’s a smidge less windy than it has been. Maybe I’ll even break down and go to a library.

The fact that it’s supposed to pour again all day tomorrow (well, today at this point) means that at least the “go outside more” part of this plan won’t start until Wednesday, but I think putting my finger on the problem will at least help me address it.

Until I was 28, I thought I was going to make movies and TV for a living.

Until I was ____, I thought I was going to be a professional computer nerd.

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Life has taken a lot of twists and turns for me since the writers’ strike of 2007-2008. Since that strike began on November 5, 2007, I have spent almost twelve of these last 24 months unemployed.

Part of that was the strike. Part of that was my decision to move into the production line and out of working directly for producers, which is an inherently more volatile career path.

But much of it has been the way the bottom has absolutely fallen out of filming in L.A. The combination of the strike starting a rearrangement of the way the business works and the economy in general going down the tubes has contributed to a precipitous drop in filming here. There’s just no work.

I realized a couple months ago as I was making my bajillionth phone call looking for work that I have not received one phone call back since June. June was also my last interview, for a job I had locked down until an actor decided to put in a good word for his niece, and then she had it locked down.

I’ve offered to take PA jobs again, but they’re not looking to take someone with as much experience in higher-up jobs as I have. In some cases, they think it’s because I think I’m above the scut work (which I don’t, I wouldn’t be applying for a PA job if I did), and in some cases, it seems they think I’ll outshine them (with the people who are insecure enough to actually worry about this, that might be a more valid concern).

Everywhere I look in terms of what my skills can get me in the entertainment business, I either see jobs that are so severely overworked and underpaid that I would rather work at Starbucks again than take them, because at least at Starbucks I would get health insurance, or nothing at all.

And frankly, the way things are going right now with the economy and the out-of-state filming incentives and the studios and networks freaking the fuck out about every last penny, I don’t see that scenario changing in the next 18-24 months at the absolute earliest.

Sometimes, you just wake up and realize that the universe is trying to tell you something. And the universe is telling me it’s time to do something else with my life.

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And now, a brief comic interlude:

Click to enlarge.

From Amazing Super Powers.

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I’ve always been a pop-culture nerd, but I wasn’t a serious computer nerd until the last 3-4 years. I learned some HTML programming in college, and really enjoyed it, but the complete time-sink that is working in entertainment pulled me off the track that would have kept me learning more about programming.

While the primary technical things that I’ve done in the last few years have involved technical troubleshooting and working as an ad-hoc IT Guy, what I really want to learn about is how to make computers do what I want them to.

And to do that, I need to learn how to program. I need to learn about architecture and C++ and the vagaries of programming for different platforms. I really want to learn how to take some ideas I have for programs and turn them into reality, from start to finish.

This, however, will require a fair amount of school. Right now I’m on step 0.1, taking some very basic classes at the community college level, trying to figure out exactly where my interests take me in terms of how I want to program.

My ultimate goal is a Masters’ in Computer Science. I’m in the middle of a choose-your-own-adventure bit of figuring out how that’s going to happen, but I do know that I’m sure as shit not going back to school just to get a second Bachelor’s.

I’m putting together an application to Stanford to start next fall, since a) they have an extraordinarily strong program and b) they are one of the only well-respected Graduate-level CS programs that will actually accept people who don’t have a CS undergrad background as long as they’re willing to learn.

It’s an extremely competitive program, so I have a fairly comprehensive backup plan standing by. I’ll get into it at some point down the road if need be.

If I do somehow manage to get into Stanford, however, I expect to hear a lot of this [note: mp3 link].

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I’ve talked to a fair number of you guys about all this in differing degrees of depth, but I felt like I really needed to try and bring everything together in one place, almost more for my own purposes than to try and clarify it for everyone else.

I certainly won’t say I’m never working in entertainment again. If someone offered me a job right now that would help me keep my union health insurance even a bit longer, I’d take it in a second. But I don’t see my future in production anymore, and that’s where things have changed.

This is a path that’s been slowly coalescing over the last few months, and has picked up a lot of steam since about Labor day, when I finally accepted that I probably wouldn’t work in entertainment for much of the rest of the year.

It took a long time for the pieces to come together well enough for me to see them, but once they did, my way forward became much, much clearer. I’ve got a plan, or really a bunch of plans all leading in the same direction.

Now all I have to do is try and figure out how to get there from here.

Chaplin seems to be biologically programmed to wake up at about 8am and knock shit over until I drag myself out of bed, so things are not going to be fun until I can convince my body that really, midnight is a perfectly reasonable time to go to sleep.

I haven’t had hard-core insomnia in a while, so I’d forgotten a few things about it. Things get much much quieter in my neighborhood, since the dull roar of the freeway fades to almost nothing.

Sounds I normally wouldn’t notice, like the ticking of the clock over my TV or the ringing in my ears from years of thinking I was going to be a rock star, become overwhelming.

The biggest problem with insomnia when unemployed is that it’s very difficult to motivate myself to get back on a normal schedule, because really, what do I really need to get up for?

Other than, you know, my sanity?

From Garfield Minus Garfield:

And one that was recently reposted by The Onion, Unemployed Man Getting Really Good At Unemployment:

Through a months-long process of trial and error, Higby has learned the tricks of the unemployment trade.

“Leaving the house every single day is very important, even if it’s just to spend a few hours at the coffee shop organizing the MP3 files on your laptop,” Higby said. “I try to be out the door by 2 or 3 in the afternoon—no exceptions. You have to get out and do something during the day in order to not feel guilty about going out drinking that night.”

• I’m bored out of my mind and am slowly feeling my sanity slip away as I go deeper into my fourth month of unemployment?
• I’m coming down with something?
• My increasingly unbearable bed is causing me to sleep so poorly that I actually feel worse when I wake up?

I’m at least trying to do something about #1 and #3 – I decided to take a couple computer science classes in the fall at my friendly local community college to prevent my brain from turning completely to mush, and to do so online so I can keep going even if I do get a job.

I also decided it’s time to break down and crack into some super-on-ice-pretend-they-don’t-exist funds and get a new mattress, just to be able to get a decent night’s sleep for once.

I’m just going to have to cross my fingers it’s not #2.

What should be on television in the middle of the day? What should fill the space between all those commercials for personal-injury attorneys, cures for urinary-tract infections and the promises of vo-tech schooling? Should anything be on? (Is “off” an option anymore, even in hospitals?)

All the available genres nearly died or migrated to niche networks — game shows, sitcom reruns, soaps, cooking demonstrations, local chatter. What programming remains will make you thank your lucky stars that you aren’t infirm or underemployed. The sound of a television turned on at high noon is the sound of utter human defeat. (The drone never ceases with the ads: bad credit, bad floors, bad living.)

As someone who is under-to-unemployed and on occasion turns on live TV in the middle of the day: Ye gods, is he ever right.

• Turned 28, to relatively little fanfare. Which is probably appropriate, because it’s not a terribly significant birthday. Drinks at the friendly local “We have a ton of awesome beer” establishment were fun, though.
   
• Found a surprisingly viable backup employment plan if I can’t get on anything for the fall season (which I’ll go into at some point later on if/when it happens). But the good news is that I am relatively confident that I will not be boiling my own shoes for dinner. At least not until after Thanksgiving.
   
• Had my phone deteriorate to the point where it’s going to take a lot of restraint for me to not smash the thing with a ballpeen hammer between now and next Friday when I get the new iPhone. Thankfully I have kept a dedicated phone replacement fund and have decided to say “Screw unemployment!” and just get the damn new one.
   
• Gotten new neighbors after 5 months of the apartment next door being empty because the landlord refused to face reality about the way rents are falling around here. They seem nice, but their cigarette smoke seeps into my apartment on occasion, and they let their cats roam about, which tends to freak Chaplin out in the middle of the night from time to time.
   
• Broke down and finally gotten myself the “Hooray, I lost 80lbs!” reward I’d been planning to get for months: An iPod shuffle/waterproof headset combo which will keep me entertained while swimming long distances. I’m now doing 2 miles with no problem, and I’m considering bumping up to 4km when I can get away with it.
   
• Watched an absolute fuckton of TV. Rewatched entire 4th season of BSG, now working through Netflix discs of Big Bang Theory (more geekily amusing than I recalled it being, since I dropped it after the pilot) and re-watching Band of Brothers, probably going to go through all of Deadwood next.
   
• Received a sternly worded letter from the landlord to the entire building that the toilets are ONLY for disposal of human waste and toilet paper. I’m not sure whether or not I want to hear the story behind that one.
   
• Have fought the good fight against my body’s natural instinct to stay awake ridiculously late and then get up mid-morning. Generally won, though this week I’ve mostly lost (as evidenced by the timestamp on this post).

Having been unemployed and stuck at home long enough, however, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I feel like it ought to be addressed. And I’m getting pretty far down on the list of other projects that need to be done.

Hauling about four bags of crap to the trash and sticking another box in my car to go to Goodwill after just hitting the living room and bedroom at a moderate level today felt like progress. There are now several more square feet of visible floor than there were this morning.

The problem is, that’s just what I had to do to get the place clean enough that I would be comfortable actually having a cleaning professional come in and clean everything else. Sadly, I splurged on something else (that I’ll write about once it’s up and running), so my time vs. money ratio tells me it’s all on me to clean.

It’s a definite multi-day task. The bathroom alone is probably going to take me a goodly chunk of tomorrow, and there’s a filing nightmare that awaits me in about a year’s worth of paperwork that’s currently sitting in a gigantic pile on my chair, telling me that I need to switch more of my bills to e-bills.

But hey, it’s something to do. And when I’ve reached the point where I’m so bored that I’m resorting to cleaning to have something to do, it is officially time for me to get a job.