While reading my post about recovering my very old blog again, I read the Blogger Importer docs again and noticed that it has an option to recover comments as well.

I’m not sure if it had that option when I converted them originally or that I just ignored it because my Jekyll based static website and blog would not have comments anyway. But since I found a way to display the old comments from the original (self written) blog, I decided to give it a go and see what the result of that conversion would be.

Luckily I had backuped the Blogger export better, so the XML was still there. I cloned my repository in a separate temporary directory, installed the Ruby Gems that are needed to run the importer by putting them in Gemfiles. Then I ran the command to import the blog as complete as possible. And there were the comments, in a separate directory named _comments. It was as easy as that!

It turned out the old Blogger blog had around 20 comments. So another hour of manual labour and those comments were restored as well.