pelican-plugins/pelican_comment_system/doc/import.md

Importing Comments

Note: Contributions to this section are welcomed!

When moving to Pelican and the Pelican Comment System, it may be desirable to move over your comments as well.

The scripts to support this are found in the import directory.

Blogger

Blogger is good in that it will give you an export of everything, but the bad news is it's one giant XML file. XML is great if you're a computer, but a bit of a pain if you're a human.

The code I used to export my comments from Blogger is found at blogger_comment_export.py.

To use it yourself, you will need to first adjust the constants at the beginning of the script (lines 26-33) to point to your Blogger XML export and where you want the comments to be exported to. You will also need to install untangle (available through pip -- pip install untangle).

Comments will be exported into folders matching the Blogger slug of the post. The email for all authors will be noreply@blogger.com. The other file created will be authors.txt which lists the various comment authors, and a link to the profile picture used on Blogger. These pictures will need to be manually downloaded and then configured using the PELICAN_COMMENT_SYSTEM_AUTHORS setting. In my case, that looked like this:

# in pelicanconf.py
PELICAN_COMMENT_SYSTEM_AUTHORS = {
    ('PROTIK KHAN', 'noreply@blogger.com'): "images/authors/rabiul_karim.webp",
    ('Matthew Hartzell', 'noreply@blogger.com'): "images/authors/matthew_hartzell.webp",
    ('Jens-Peter Labus', 'noreply@blogger.com'): "images/authors/jens-peter_labus.png",
    ('Bridget', 'noreply@blogger.com'): "images/authors/bridget.jpg",
    ('melissaclee', 'noreply@blogger.com'): "images/authors/melissa_lee.jpg",
    ('Melissa', 'noreply@blogger.com'): "images/authors/melissa_lee.jpg"
}

The script was developed for Python 3.6, but should work on Python 3.4+ without modification.

For more information on this script on, you can read my blog post where I introduced it.

-- Wm. Minchin (@MinchinWeb), January 10, 2017