Recently I wanted to try out the Intense Debate commenting system on this blog. I didn't want to lose all the comments that I had already and Intense Debate only supports importing comments from Blogger, etc but not custom blog software. Since I wrote this blog using the Django framework using django.contrib.comments I needed to come up with my own solution.

It only took one Tamper Data request to see how an anonymous comment was posted into the Intense Debate system. A few minutes later I had a script to import my old comments into Intense Debate.

intenseDebate.py

import intenseDebate
intenseDebate.postComment(blogpostid="", acctid="", anonName="", anonEmail="", \
    anonURL="", comment="")

• blogpostid is the unique Intense Debate postId. You can find this easily on any Intense Debate powered page using the firebug dom tab. The key to look for is "IDCommentScript".
• acctid is your Intense Debate accountId. This can also be found using the firebug dom tab. The key to look for is "IDWUserWidget.acctid"
• anonName is the name of the commenter
• anonEmail is the commenters email address
• anonURL is the commenters web address
• comment is the text of the comment

This method of importing comments does have it's problems.

1. Manual process to get the blogpostid.
2. No way of getting the Date/Time into Intense Debate.

Footnote: I don't have a problem with Django comments, especially when paired with django-comment-utils, I just wanted to give Intense Debate a try.