Because Akismet has been letting me down recently on this site, I've decided to 'outsource' the commenting and spam checking to Disqus.

Installing Disqus is a piece of cake. You sign up and drop some JavaScript onto your site. Even the "# comments" that you see near the top of this post is taken care of by just pasting some JS.

But there are two things that I would potentially lose that I was concerned about:

1. My "legacy" comments
2. My Latest Comments widget (which I'll cover in part 2)

If I were migrating from WordPress or some other well-known blog software, it would have been really easy. WordPress->export, Disqus->import.

However, this site runs on my own home-grown blog engine (for better or for worse). I could have just left my legacy comments alone, and let them exist side-by-side on older blog posts. I called that "plan B".

But once I knew that I could import from other engines, well, I assumed there must be a way for me to "fake" it. It was a little bit of work, and it still might not be perfect, but it worked.

I researched the formats that Disqus can handle. One of them is the WordPress WXR format, which is based on RSS, which is based on XML. So, all I had to do was figure out how to generate the right XML. There isn't really a "spec" on the WXR, at least not one that I could find. Luckily, Disqus publishes specs for their own Custom XML Import Format, which is a version of WXR. Once I had that, it was a piece of cake to create an "Export to WXR" button on this very site. Here's roughly what it looks like in an MVC Razor View:

Some notes:

• I used generated Guids for the comment_id. I'm not sure if it makes any difference from an import perspective, other than they should probably be unique.
• I put both comment_date and comment_date_gmt. I don't believe that comment_date is actually used, but I put them both in there just in case.
• Notice the <![CDATA[ ... ]]> within the comment_content. The CDATA is a way to encode data within XML tags that an XML parser might otherwise attempt to interpret.
• The BlogPostName is the friendly English version (e.g. "I like balloons"). The BlogPostSlug is the URL-friendly version (e.g. "I-like-balloons").
• I used Html.Raw because otherwise Razor seemed to have trouble parsing what I was generating. I'm not worried about any sort of DOM injection, since this export utility is behind auth. But generally, you should be wary of using Html.Raw in Razor

To import, I just saved the output of this view, and went to Disqus Import, and uploaded the file. It goes into a processing queue, and the time it takes with vary depending on how many comments you are importing and (I assume) how many other workloads that Disqus is trying to process. I imported 86 comments multiple times, and it generally took about 5 minutes at most.

Welcome to another "Weekly Concerns". This is a post-a-week series of interesting links, relevant to programming and programmers. You can check out previous Weekly Concerns posts in the archive.

• I've been exploring the Command/Query Objects pattern, specifically with the idea of replacing the repository pattern. I've started with Dustin's Brown post about Command/Query Objects with Dapper.
• How to setup Twitter Cards for your site (specifically WordPress, but blog post is helpful for everyone else too).
• Rob Gibbens posted about using Fody.PropertyChanged (an AOP plugin to the Fody IL rewriting framework) with Xamarin to use the MVVM pattern.
• EconTalk is one of my favorite podcasts. Check out this episode about the "sharing economy", in which they discuss the impact of technology like Uber, AirBnb, and so on, featuring my favorite guest: Michael Munger. Especially interesting to me is the discussion about taxi medallion investments.

If you have an interesting link that you'd like to see in Weekly Concerns, leave a comment or contact me.

Welcome to another "Weekly Concerns". This is a post-a-week series of interesting links, relevant to programming and programmers. You can check out previous Weekly Concerns posts in the archive.

• 5 Things You Should Stop Doing With jQuery. It's a sensational title, but read all the way to the end before you judge.
• PostSharp 3.2 Preview 2 is available, with improvements that help you write multi-threaded code (among other things).
• Direct casting vs "as" casting in C#
• Check out the new and improved WordPress Code Reference.

If you have an interesting link that you'd like to see in Weekly Concerns, leave a comment or contact me.

Welcome back to another "Weekly Concerns" (after skipping a week). This is a post-a-week series of interesting links, relevant to programming and programmers. You can check out previous Weekly Concerns posts in the archive.

• If you haven't seen Seth Petry-Johnson's Patterns of Effective Test Setup presentation yet, you should at least check out his slides.
• Source code for MS-DOS and Word for Windows is now available.
• You can play Missile Command with a YouTube video. Just go to any YouTube video, like this one, and type "1980".
• Mark Greenway and myself did an introductory presentation on WordPress with Azure through the MVP Mentor program. A recording of WordPress with Azure is now available.

If you have an interesting link that you'd like to see in Weekly Concerns, leave a comment or contact me.