HTLM and Haloscan catastrophe!

UPDATE:  I give up!  Trying to follow haloscan/echo instructions I went back to the old template.  Blogger failed to save the template I had.  Then haloscan wanted me to pay BEFORE I could try the solution they supposedly were offering.  Of course, if it did not work and if I asked for a refund, you can imagine the risk on my CADIVI card: credit cards are blocked for less than that (I mean it is not a matter of many bucks, echo only asks for ten bucks, but after the initial setbacks, I sort of lost trust in their tech support and their skills...)

So eventually I was left tonight to set up back the new template I worked these past days.  At least by some  quirk blogger gave me back the widgets I had installed.  Still I had to restore fonts and colors and I did not get back what I had yesterday.  But too late tonight to worry about that.

I made a decision:  I am going to forget about the 50,000 + comments of haloscan/echo.  Many were excellent but it is just going to be too much of an ordeal to recover them.  Besides, few people ever show a disposition to dig for old comments.  For those who do, I have them backed up and with the appropriate indications might be able to retrieve them.
I am still weak, I tire easy, and my job is not to design fancy sites but to provide content.  In addition after this experience I lost trust in Echo and I do not want to be tied with them forever.  That is, with them I have no warranty they will be around next year whereas blogger comments belong to Google, if you see what I mean.  They are simpler than haloscan, do not allow me to ban people or edit trolls, just to erase them.  It will be less fun but more reliable: the features offered by Echo so as to post videos or tie comments to social networks are not really something that this blog cares much about: if people really want to point a video, the link is fine, and if they want their comments to appear in their twitter or facebook, well, they can link to the post........

Let's just say that with the change of year we changed to new blogger.  On one side we lost a treasure of comments (I am still going to write them a last chance note)  but in the other hand we get to put as many widgets as we want, including better link lists and polls.  And a lighter design that still respects the intention of the old one.  In addition we get rid of "the end " in blue at the end of truncated posts since now I get an automated post cutter in my editor.  Small compensation perhaps but times are a changing and if I ever make a book of posts I can still scavenge for the comments of the time to include the most telling ones.

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And the day of reckoning cometh....

Haloscan is closing and going out of my blog in barely 24 hours. The replacing system, that supposedly saves the old comments only works with the new blogger version, not the old classic one that I have been holding until now.

In other words, I am screwed. There is only a small chance to save my comments and thus I had to update my blog fast. All the look and feel of the old blog is temporarily lost. Over time I will recover some of the design but it will never be quite the same. I am a victim of advancing technology. True I had the option to open a new site like Miguel or Quico, but all that work would be really worth it if I could locate it out of Venezuela and find a way to pay for it in spite of CADIVI. Amen of security options....

But I have links in too many places and the look is, hate it or love it, an institution of sorts. So I chose blogger upgrade. Over the next few days I will try to recover my comments and slowly but surely recover what can be recovered from the old design (the flag is already up!). Meanwhile you can write to me for comments, or post on the blogger comment system whihc I have a feeling we might get stuck with.

Wish me luck!