Thursday, February 24, 2011

Computer Maintenance Blocking Left Lane Ahead


Working on the webpage....... Posted by Picasa

"If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." ~ One of Murphy's Laws of Technology
I am taking the plunge, heading into unknown territory, on a mission (hopefully not a five year one) to explore the inner workings of this layout and attempt to change over from the worst commenting system in the universe JS-Kit Echo..... to something manageable without losing all the comments. Cross your fingers, say a prayer and hope.... In the mean time I have to disable commenting for a while... I really don't know how long. I will try and keep it as short as possible... but as you know with computers.....
"The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back." ~ Author Unknown
(Gulp!) OK... Here we go!

(end of post)
Update: Well, I did it and with less than stellar results. Yes, Disqus imported the Blogger comments that were synched up with Echo... But, while Disqus imported the raw files that I had exported from Echo.. Echo and JSKIT (which is the ABSOLUTE WORST!!!!!! commenting system in the universe and who wants you to PAY $120 a year for using the ABSOLUTE WORST!!!! system) for all their self-serving praise, managed to download their comments without identifiers to show which post they belong to. I figure this is because they thought of those of us who used Haloscan and whom they had to bring into the system when they bought and ravaged Haloscan were simply second rate. They did nothing to help us salvage the Haloscan comments if we wanted to move. Their pricing went from "free" if you came over from Haloscan, to $11 a year, to $120 a year within four months. Their service is lousy... two to three weeks to even get an email back when initiating a service problem. They have dismounted their forum where a lot of quick help could be had .... probably because they were getting so much NEGATIVE feedback that it tied up too many employees to delete it from the site.

I found out that there is one redeeming thing about all the old, old spam that showed up in comments. You know.. when you occasionally go to the 2005 posts and find a comment from "Cleaning houses in _________.(insert VA, NV, GA, or whatever).. It seems that the presence of those comments, somehow getting posted by bypassing some form or other... well, they grounded the post... gave it identity and made the other imported Haloscan comments that were legitimate, show up. So, I've lost all the comments on many favorite posts.... sigh. I still have the exported original Haloscan files from the day I was forced to switch to Echo. Perhaps some geeky angel will figure something out.

Until then, I am back and I think this comment system is more user friendly.... at least it has a spot to put in the commenter's website so I can return the visits.

1 comment:

Sandra said...

oh no, hope you do not disappear into the wild blue yonder of www and geeky stuff, good luck