Impulsive Highlighters

Switching Commenting Hosts

I recently switched Comment hosts from Enetation (www.enetation.co.uk) back to Blogger's built-in commenting, because Enetation was slow, comments wouldn't get posted on many occasions and there were some advertisements that were clearly unnecessary. Come to think of it, most of those reasons were the ones responsible for causing me to switch away from Blogger in the first place. Now, either Blogger has fixed them, or because I'm in the US, those factors have been taken care of. So, back to Blogger it is, after going through a chain of switches from first HaloScan to Blogger (because HaloScan had a limit of 200 comments for the entire site), then from Blogger to Enetation (because Blogger was so slow) and now from Enetation back to Blogger (because Enetation is so slow and Blogger allows me to do peek-a-boo commenting).

Now, although you get a lot of exposure by trying out three different commenting services, it is an enormous hassle to switch if you intend to keep the comments from the old service. Me? I think it's very important to keep the comments. However, switching from Enetation back to Blogger has been more or less painless thanks to a chance discovery of mine. See, what I do not want is for two (or three) comment links to appear next to the blog entries, for each of the commenting services. So, what I did for HaloScan was to manually save each comment page as an HTML file, upload it to a personal server and link it from the entry - extremely tedious if you notice. But I endured it.

For Enetation, it's way easier. Just go to enetation.co.uk and login. Once there, click on the "settings" link. On the "settings" page, under the "No Comments" field, just delete anything that's there and leave it blank. Save your settings by hitting the "submit" button, and head over to the "debug" link. Click on "Fix user.php counters". This is basically required so that it regenerates the comment counter code and your changes take effect. With this in effect, you don't need to change the Blogger template code too much because all new entries will have 0 comments and by your new rule, all entries with 0 comments show a link that consists of nothing. Isn't that great? All the old entries will maintain their comment counters. Aren't I a genius?

Two things to note
1. If you have entries with comments both in Enetation and Blogger, you'll need to make sure there's some sort of separator like a space or a semicolon between the two comment links
2. Also, if you have older entries which have 0 comments, go back and enable Blogger comments for those. Or stop hoping for comments on those entries :-)

Have fun commenting! 

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