Site Migration In Progress

If you found me here, please pardon the mess. I am currently migrating old posts to the new site, which itself is a work in progress. You will see many old posts show up, many of which I haven’t looked at in years.

This migration should be complete in a few days. Thanks for your patience.

10 thoughts on “Site Migration In Progress”

  1. Nice to see you still have all the info from the old i-r-squared.blogspot.com site.

    I noticed however, that the comments I posted to old articles after you migrated to energytrendsinsider.com aren’t here yet. I hope you will transfer over the comments from
    http://www.energytrendsinsider.com/2008/12/22/ambitious-solar-plans-in-france-solar-capacity-factors/
    and add them to the end of
    http://www.rrapier.com/2008/12/ambitious-solar-plans-in-france-solar/
    particularly the Fait Accompli comment.

    1. The problem is that I don’t have admin access at Energy Trends Insider, so I wasn’t able to export a file and the comments. So it has been a tedious process of moving over posts one at a time. There were about 500 there. I don’t think there is any mechanism for moving over the comments. I have tried to engage the site owner of ETI about it, but he has gone silent.

      On the old blogger articles, I was able to pull in the old comments, but if I enable Disqus it then hides the old comments. So I haven’t figured out yet how I am going to address that.

      Cheers, Robert

  2. Hi Robert, sorry I didn’t see this earlier. There’s a pretty good chance I would be able to scrape all your posts and their comments off energytrendsinsider.com, and produce them in any format you like. Mail me if that’s likely to be of any use. In the meantime I’ll experiment with it and see if it comes to anything.

    1. Hi Peter,

      That would be great. I think we have pulled over all the posts, but couldn’t figure out a good way to bring over the comments. It’s complicated by the fact that the original Blogger comments are incompatible with Disqus, which was used at ETI. So if I turn Disqus on, they disappear. If you have a solution, please let me know.

      Thanks, Robert

  3. Update: yep, I can definitely scrape the posts, and Disqus provides an api to return all the comments in json format — you can see an example set here: https://disqus.com/api/3.0/threads/listPostsThreaded?limit=100&thread=5674805759&forum=consumerenergyreport&order=popular&cursor=1:0:0&api_key=E8Uh5l5fHZ6gD8U3KycjAIAk46f68Zw7C6eW8WSjZvCLXebZ7p0r1yrYDrLilk2F.

    I can probably scrape that and munge it into any required format — the question is whether there is any sensible format you can import, given the comments are threaded etc.

  4. (Actually that last Disqus link won’t work if you click it directly. It should work if you c&p into your browser address bar. Disqus does a “referrer” check on the site you’re linking from and makes sure it’s the one they issued their api key to. I don’t _think_ that’ll stop me scraping them programatically).

  5. Hmmm… folks generally don’t seem to have a good time migrating comments from Disqus into WordPress:

    https://the-orbit.net/lousycanuck/2011/09/20/the-nightmare-that-is-disqus-export-and-import-into-wordpress/

    I’m able to get all your Disqus comments (with a homegrown scraping tool) and output them in any format, but getting them into WordPress could be a challenge too far (especially given I don’t have access to root around on the internals of your blog).

  6. I wonder if you can go the other way. Integrate all the old Blogger comments into Disqus? I hate to lose those comments, but I haven’t figured out a good solution. Anyway, thanks for looking into it.

Comments are closed.