Warning: Possible blog breakage coming

I've been putting off switching to "the new Blogger" scheme for some time, but now I'm up against a bit of a wall. Like this:

For a long, long time, I've used Haloscan's third party commenting service, and I love it. Awhile back, Haloscan was acquired by another outfit, JS-Kit, and now they're moving to a paid service called "Echo." The Haloscan scheme you're probably used to by now is going away.

I don't object to paying for premium service (the price is right -- $9.95 per year, but I've already tried Echo over at Rational Review, and it's already presenting problems.

The first issue I had led me to a support thread in which JS-Kit essentially informed users "we know how you should have your comments displayed (reverse chronological order), and if you think you'd rather have it some other way (chronological order), well, tough."

So, I'm looking at a couple of other options -- going back to regular Blogger comments, or converting to Disqus or Intense Debate. I'm most likely going to have to bite the bullet and convert to "new Blogger" to make either of the latter happen, and there are other reasons to make the jump anyway.

So, if you arrive here and the blog looks broken, it's because I've done the conversion and haven't finished cleaning up any resulting messes yet. That whole thing will probably start in about oh, five minutes.

Update: The horror! I can't even convert my existing template at all! I assumed I could just do that, with some possible breakage, but noooooooo, I have to pick one of their pre-fab jobs. So ... maybe later.

Update 2: Okay, went ahead and took the plunge. I've got a lot of re-wiring to do to get the thing back into something like the state it was. I've implemented commenting by Disqus, and have uploaded nine files of Haloscan export comments that should be re-imported over the next few hours. The script that drove my collapsible/expandable blogrolls trips an error in Blogger, so I'm going to have to find a different solution there.