August 27, 2012

How To Activate DISQUS Commenting System in Blogger instead of Haloscan Echo

When I first started my blog in blogger in 2003 its comment system was not great. Haloscan (est. in 2002) was one of the third-party blog comment hosting services available in those days and I guess in 2005 I started using Haloscan. Haloscan was acquired by JS-Kit in 2008 and was renamed Echo in 2009. The users of Haloscan were forced to switch to JS-Kit Echo paying a fee. I could go back to blogger's own commenting system which became mature by then. But one problem was how to retain the hundreds of comments I had received back then. So I decided to switch to Echo.

In April 2012 Echo announced that Echo would discontinue JS-Kit, Haloscan and Echo comment modules from October 1, 2012 in favor of social media applications.
As many of you know, in late 2010, Echo decided to shift our product strategy and start offering a real-time platform as opposed to strictly a commenting application. Since then, Echo has evolved our original commenting solution into a new business model that provides a real-time platform for social tv, social news, social music and social commerce. As such, we unfortunately can no longer commit to the level of support that you have come to expect on our original commenting product.

 Now the challenge for me was to find a new commenting service or go back to the blogger's own commenting system. And the previous concern was there too that whether I can retain all previous comments on my blog. A great savior was DISQUS which I first saw embedded in Global Voices site. It has a lot to offer.
Disqus (est. in 2007) is an online discussion and commenting service for websites and online communities that uses a networked platform. The company’s platform includes various features, such as social integration, social networking, user profiles, spam and moderation tools, analytics, email notifications, and mobile commenting. (Wikipedia)
Disqus is written in JavaScript and is powered by a back end primarily written in Django. It is supported by all major webbrowsers. So how to switch to Disqus, if you are a Haloscan user in Blogger? First read this quick start guide and create an account in Disqus, register your site and create a short name for your site. Then install Disqus in your site according to platform specific instructions.

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Now the best part - here is a step by step guide for importing previous comments from JS-Kit (first you have to export them from JS-Kit and yes within September 30, 2012). After uploading Disqus will take upto 24 hours to process all your previous comments. I am yet to see the result of the import. But here is to hoping that I don't lose much.

p.s. If you want to do it manually in Blogger then this may help.

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