Edit the second (the first is below within the entry): the entire thing is moot for now, because HaloScan has a way to do inline comments now! That solves my initial problem, that of the stupid commenting pop-up. I still want a way to back up the entirety of my DiaryLand account though, so here's my musings on that.
I got in a conversation a few weeks ago that still has me grumpily pondering my options. I replied to Does Your Blog Still Offer Popup Comments? on the Blog Herald to the effect that yes, mine does, and there isn't a good way to offer non-popup comments. The author, Lorelle VanFossen, responded with a link to a Google search for "export diaryland" with the suggestion that I find a better blog system.
I have the utmost respect for Lorelle and am touched that she wanted to help me. The problem is that I have run that search many times and tried all the synonyms I could conjure, and I have only found two ways to export entries from Diaryland: pony up a minimum of $11.99 for three months of Gold service, which should allow you to download one text file containing all your entries (unless that feature requires SuperGold service starting at $19.99 for three months), or use Liberate.
Both options suck. Neither lets me keep my comments with their entries, either.
Third option: mtimport format, which seems to require altering my template and saving every single entry page separately. It requires that HTML entities not be encoded, but all my DiaryLand entries that have use them have them encoded. How should I work around that? I'll come back to it when I'm less hot-headed.
I have fond memories of DiaryLand and my interactions with its denizens, but memories don't justify $12 just to pry my content out of the DiaryLand server. I don't care about the other oh-so-wonderful features that Diaryland charges for and that every other blog host worth a damn supplies for free, and what's more, I'm insulted by Diaryland's insinuation that I, a geek with too much free time, would pay money when there is a free solution waiting to be discovered or cobbled together.
I've tried Liberate and gotten back a file that purports to be in MovableType export format. I have a specific distaste for MovableType and will not use it. Luckily WordPress accepts MT exports -- but not Liberate exports, which will bloat your database but never, ever show on your actual WP blog.
Damn right I'm bitter.
A close friend informs me that Liberate occasionally cuts off entries in its export. I know that, after filling a WP database with entries that wouldn't display, the extra kick in the pants was that some entries had been cut off. Whether this happened in the export process or during the import to WP I couldn't say, but I compared the SQL dump to the original entries and found that the WP copy was truncated whenver two dashes appeared in a row. That's a common old typographical substitute for a real em-dash, and one I used extensively in my DiaryLand entries.
I can't check the Liberate code to see exactly what it's doing because it's hosted on an outside server. I've found dead links in Google showing that Liberate was once available as a download to run on your own server, but there's no trace of that version now. Fantastic.
Which leaves me wondering which is the greater evil: paying DiaryLand money they don't deserve in order to download an unwieldly text file in no particular export format; "backing up" my site using Liberate only to find it incomplete; or just deleting this entire mess and pretending forever that those eight years of being a DiaryLander never happened.
Happy New Year. My resolution is to conclusively solve my conundrum so that I need never contemplate it again.