I have been using HaloScan for more than a year, and now they are announcing that they reached 100,000 customers. Congratulations! I am very grateful with you. The fact that I am trying now to live with the less sophisticated Blogger comments system has nothing to do with user dissatisfaction.
The actual cause is I suffer some kind of split personality thing, software-wise. On one hand I can enjoy like crazy while tuning code to make the most of every CPU cycle, or the most of every network round-trip in a distributed application, but regarding other things like blogging, I like just to be a spoiled user, and I don't want to look under the hood for simple tasks. This makes me some hybrid category of developer. Actually, when I develop something, I am not satisfied until everything that can be automated is automated, because as a user, I am so lazy!
This is the reason I have decided to minimize template manteinance. If I had the time and the patience right now to apply many patches to every new template I choose, I would instead build my own blogging engine and solve the problem once and forever!
So, what does HaloScan gives me that Blogger doesn't? I can only think of trackback. I have rarely used trackback, and never that I know has anybody tried to ping me. So, I won't miss it much. And MSN Spaces support trackback, so I guess Blogger will have to do it soon.
On the other hand, Blogger does a more beautiful job placing comments in post pages and showing the post text (for free), in the comments posting form.
The thing that I will resent the most is the collection of old comments itself. This is no art, howoever, loosing them forever feels like forgetting how to play a song I have composed (it has happened to me, too many times, believe me, and it hurts).
So I guess the right thing would be to donate something to HaloScan as a way to say thanks, and at the same time upgrade my free account with them so I can download all my old comments in a file.
By the way, Blogger does not import comments in any format. Shame.
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