It used to be a really simple process; click a button on Disqus admin, log into blogger, and then comments are migrated. But Disqus was left with a broken import link when Google deprecated some of their APIs. Given that it's been broken for a while, I didn't see that being fixed anytime soon.
So, I finally got some time to roll my own fix based off a bit of code I previously wrote. Now that it's been tested for a few weeks, I've decided to make it public.
This is a multi-step process but doesn't take more than a few minutes each to set up.
Exporting your existing comments
- Go to your Blogger admin and then find the settings item on the left menu.
- Under that, look for "Other settings"
- Click "Export blog" at the top.
- Save the backup file somewhere.
I don't blame you for having trouble finding it. Below is a screenshot of where to click.
Converting your comments to WXR
What you have now are comments in some God-awful XML format which you'll need to convert to Wordpress WXR format, one that Disqus can import.
You can either use my online "Blogger to Disqus comment converter" tool which uses django-disqus, or (if you don't trust me) check out the source and run it yourself.
Setting up Disqus
This part is fairly straight forward.
- Create a Disqus forum for your site.
- Go to the admin and then the Discussions tab
- Click Import
- Select the Generic tab
- Upload the converted WXR file
- While you wait, continue with the setup below.
Setting up Disqus on Blogger
Now that the import process has started, there's just one more thing left to do on your blog. While you wait for the import to complete, set up the Disqus plugin on your blogger so the old comments don't show anymore.
There is a page on Disqus that lets you quickly add the plugin to the site of your choice.
Click on this link and then:
- Click the "Add <disqus forum name> to my Blogger site" button (Step 1. You can ignore step 2 because we already did that)
- Select a blog you wish to use Disqus
- Click "Add widget"
Supporting Internet Explorer users
For those who wish to support Internet Explorer users, there is an extra step involved.
Check the source of your blog and search for "X-UA-Compatible" and check that it's using "EDGE". If it's not there or it's not showing "EDGE", Disqus has a decent tutorial written up here on how to add it into your Blogger template.
And that's the end of that! The Disqus widget on Blogger will handle the rest.
You're finally done!
