Blogger imported without a problem (although my dashboard says there’s comments attached to something and I can’t find em). That’s roughly 2.5 years of posts.

I also discovered that the backup files for the most prolific time of my blogging career – 2005-2007 – WILL import. One month at a time, and they all come in with the same posting date, so I have a little bit of editing to do once they’re imported, but it’s a metric ton of cut and paste that I don’t have to do.

And I have a possible idea to see if I can get the more recent section into a format that will import. If it doesn’t work, then I have about 200 posts total still to cut and paste, which truly is not much at all in the overall picture. If it does work, I’ll be happy as a clam.

Once that’s all done, then I’ll be looking to see if anyone has come up with a way to import comments from Haloscan. I’ve already got those exported and in XML format. The issue will be matching them up to the correct posts, I think.

I’m still debating whether I want to fix formatting and broken links on old posts. I’ve noticed that some of them are coming through with line breaks in the middle of paragraphs and that some images aren’t appearing. If I do, that’s a ways down the line.

Things have really changed around here!

I got word recently through The Wagon that Haloscan is soon to be no more. I posted queries for suggestions on commenting options in a few places and sent a message to Fahim, the developer of the Blog software I’ve been using for almost 5 years, for his recommendations as well.

Fahim has moved to Macs in the last year or so and isn’t working with Blog anymore, but he suggested that since I’m hosting the blog myself rather than using Blogger or another similar web service, I might want to just install WordPress on my domain and continue to use Blog or another desktop software for posting. Sadly, this has so far turned out to *sound* much easier than we expected.

At first I was excited – the hosting company already has WordPress installed and part of my package, so I thought I could save myself a lot of time that way. Except they seem to have only a light version with limited features… and it completely over-rode the entire site. I couldn’t get to any of the nearly 5 yeras of posts I’d written since implementing Blog and I couldn’t get to the image gallery.  All I could see was my old Blogspot posts which I was able to import.

I deleted that blog so I could get my site back, and installed the full WordPress client. Another bit of fun as my FTP software kept dropping files in the middle. Which led me to install a different FTP program so I could proceed.  Finally I could get the software loaded and running.

Unfortunately, Blog still won’t talk to WordPress.  Knowing that there is no more tech support, I’ll be checking out the couple programs he suggested as replacements. My goal is to not be dependent on a web-based interface for routine posting, although if I must, I must. At least WP’s archival and import/export functions are clearly miles better than Blogger ever was. But first I need some sleep, as I’ve been up for way too many consecutive hours to be productive for much longer. I also need to find out if I can import 5 years of posts easily or if I have a lot of cut and paste ahead of me.  My fear is the latter, which is guaranteed if I go back to web-based.

Maybe later I’ll bring back the layout I’ve had for what seems like forever.  Maybe I’ll decide I like this sunset scheme better. We’ll see.