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Apr 8, 2012

Casting about 

For those out there who have faced this dilemma, I have a question. I was recently emailed by the company that runs my comments that they will be discontinuing service on 1 October. I shouldn't be surprised. The outfit is called "Echo," and before that it was "JS-kit" if I recall correctly. What these SOB's did was buy out my Haloscan comments which I really liked and had used since starting this blog. They then completely changed everything I liked about the style, layout, and simplicity... and oh, by the way, started charging me for the privilege of using their junky new P.O.S., or they would just erase all my stuff. Now they've charged me for 2 years (only about $20 total, but that's not the point) and they are still going to dump all my stuff anyway.

I don't mind losing them. In fact, I welcome it - they're crap. What annoys me is this: they don't provide a way to easily export my comments to another system. Okay... I've got a couple months... I'll just move a few here and a few there and do it manually. But... but...

And here's where I start to show my age. This blog was created before Blogger supported comments (or pictures, but that's a whole separate problem). As a result, my template doesn't have the necessary code to make the Blogger-supported comments show up. I tried making a test blog and grabbing the comment section of the code from it and slapping it into this template, but all it does is turn this blog into a snapshot of the Matrix... one long string of unintelligible alphanumeric gobbledygook. Whatever changes have been made, I haven't kept up with the times, and now I'm VHS in a Blu-ray world.

Any ideas anyone? Few as the comments may be, I do like to hear from folks, and if that option went away then it would just be me talking to a wall (which it kinda is anyway, but...). I really want to keep this blog, but it's starting to get a bit cumbersome. So maybe I'm overly sentimental, but I don't want to shut this thing off. Not the least of which reason being that if I pull the plug here... I don't know how motivated I'll be to start up again.

Sad to say, but I feel like I'm losing the bug. When I started, I was going through a lot of changes in life. I was getting forcibly placed into a new job that was not what I had joined the Corps for, and while most of my buddies were out putting warheads on foreheads, I was stuck in the rear with the gear. Blogs were this new thing, and I felt like I had a lot to say, so I dove in. Now? Now it's almost a decade later, and I feel beaten down by reality. I don't have the time and energy to devote to this like I used to. It's nice to know this is here and swing on in now and again, but I don't feel the same urge to get here like I did once upon a time. I sometimes go weeks without looking at this site when I used to not be able to go a day without seeing if someone had responded to a post. I was never good about email, but now I literally can't remember the last time I checked the hallsandshores account. As in, I have no idea if it was before or after Christmas when I last looked... sorry if anyone's sent me anything.

So do I bite the bullet, start a new blog, and see where it takes me? Or does anybody out there have a few lines of html that will turn on the Blogger comments for a site that started circa 2003?
Posted by: Mike the Marine / 11:57
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