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 https://brianpeek.com/

This will create a new file named …

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 …

I don’t blog very regularly, it seems, so in an effort to get back on the bandwagon, I decided to migrate my blog from BlogEngine.NET to Ghost, since that’s what much of the world has moved to. If you are seeing this post, apparently I was successful.

While getting Ghost itself deployed and running on Azure was super simple, migrating my old posts, comments, images, links, and other data to the Ghost platform was a pretty involved process. I learned a ton, which I’ll be writing about here in future posts.

For those that follow this blog for my GameDev Newsletter posts, I have moved those to the GameDev News link above instead of spamming the regular feed. I absolutely plan on continuing the newsletter, so look for it there.

Other than that, if you see anything completely busted, please leave a comment or ping me on Twitter. Thanks!