By default, Ghost does not have a commenting system of its own. When migrating my blog from BlogEngine.NET, I wanted to carry over old comments and maintain the commenting feature. Disqus to the rescue!

Migrating Old Comments

First, you’ll need to create an account at Disqus and select the “I want to install Disqus on my site” option. From here, you’ll walk through a wizard where you’ll give the website name, URL and other bits of information. Sign up with the Basic (free!) option.

Next, you’ll need to use that BlogML.xml file you created in the previous post and run it through a utility to convert it into a format that can be imported into Disqus.

Head over to GitHub to download and compile the BlogML2WP project, or download my precompiled version. Then, run the program like this:

BlogML2WP [inputfile] [domain]

So, for my site, it’d look like this:

BlogML2WP BlogML.xml /

This will create a new file named BlogML.Output.xml. Open this file in your favorite text editor, as you will need to “find and replace” some URL information since all posts and pages now live at the root of the site instead of the /post and /page URLs that BlogEngine uses.

As mentioned previously, I recently migrated my blog to Ghost from BlogEngine.NET. I’ll be writing a few posts discussing what I went through in the migration process.

Installing Ghost on Azure

I run my life on Azure. Previously, my BlogEngine instance was running as an App Service, so getting Ghost running on Azure was important to me. Luckily, Felix Rieseberg has already done all of the hard work for this step.

Head over to Felix’s Ghost-Azure repo on GitHub and click the big blue Deploy to Azure button. The deployment scrip will run, and you’ll be asked to log into your Azure account and fill out a form with your new site’s information (subscription, resource group, site name, etc.). When you complete this step, a new Ghost instance will be deployed to the location you requested. Simple!

Be sure to note the instructions on setting this up on a Basic (or higher) App Service Plan, then backing down to a Free/Shared plan if desired. This gets past a limitation where NPM requires more resources than a Free/Shared plan will give.