So some of you may know that I run this blog with Google’s Blogger. I know, blasphemy for someone who does this for a living. Whatever, it’s easy and you can’t beat the price. It’s also at least somewhat of a pain to move over to a new platform like Wordpress – but I’ve been very close to doing exactly that a number of times, most recently upon seeing the awesome FriendFeed plug-in by Glenn Slaven that shows on your blog when someone on FriendFeed “likes” or comments on a post.

Luckily I can put off moving from Blogger for a while again as Pat Hawks has created a brilliant method for pulling in comments on your blog posts from FriendFeed and putting them in your Blogger blog. The method, which may seem a little advanced for novice users, is really quite simple. Hawks takes you through it on his site, but I will caution that a few things in his code are off for the New Blogger method.

Because Blogger runs a tight XML ship, you will need to encode any ampersands, meaning you change this: & into this: &. The same is true for less-than or greater-than signs. You will need to re-write this as < or > — there are only two of those. Finally, when copying the code, be careful of spacing. Sometimes copying will add in an unintended line break, this will cause Blogger to throw an error as well.

I don’t want to copy all of Pat’s code over here with the fixes and steal all his well deserved thunder. So if you need help just ask me (leave a comment here or on FriendFeed!, it’ll come in here ).

Once you get it working, it looks great. The comments are styled with small FriendFeed logos and placed right below your regular comments. “Likes” are not yet included, but Hawks has indicated he will work on something to pipe those in as well.

There is one major limitation however. Because this is set up using FriendFeed’s own feeds there are only a limited number of feed items that can be pulled in. This means that only the most recently comments will be pulled in for your blog. Once these comments are pushed out of your feed by other comments/posts, these comments will vanish.

Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins has stated he hopes to come up with some database driven system to make it so these comments are retained. Don’t be shocked if FriendFeed themselves comes with a solution for pipping comments back to blogs as well. Talk had already been that they would eventually do this with the comment company Disqus.

For now, this will do. Commenting on FriendFeed is great because it’s so quick and easy, now that these comments are able to show up outside of FriendFeed, it makes me want to comment – and write – even more. It’s all about engagement.

Louis Gray has some good thoughts as well.