Tag Archives: livejournal

Moving from LiveJournal to WordPress

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I’m working on a new site for a local author, and one of the things she wanted was to move her blog from LiveJournal to WordPress. I did a bit of research, and found out that there are a few complications.

  1. LiveJournal’s export tool will only export a single month of entries at a time.
  2. The LiveJournal export file will have all the HTML encoded, meaning images and links won’t work.
  3. WordPress’s LiveJournal import tool won’t import comments.

However, thanks to a third-party LiveJournal export tool called ljArchive, I was able to get all the posts and comments exported in one file.

With that problem out of the way, I did a bit more looking and discovered that Vinit Bhansali has created a modified version of WordPress’ LiveJournal import script that decodes the HTML entities, and adds support for comments.

I was really excited to have solved my problem, and then I noticed that his notes say his script was tested in WordPress 1.5. Given that WordPress is currently at version 2.1, I wondered if his changes had maybe been incorporated into the latest version.

Happily, they have been! I’m pleased to say that I was able to use the stock WordPress LiveJournal import tool to import all the posts and their comments, and all the images and links still work.

So if you’re making the switch, you should still use ljArchive to get all your posts out at once, but you don’t need any modified WordPress scripts to import them, because the standard one works fine.

Dude, I Rule

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“I’m a strong believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule.”
– Randall inClerks

That about sums up how I feel right now. When I set up KillingMachines.org, it was the first time I had ever put up a website with a clear goal in mind. And not just a goal, but a list of them. I wanted nothing less than to write the best weblog site available. I had been to livejournal and blogger and was unimpressed. FCS could do most of what they did, and what it couldn’t do was made up for by the fact that it didn’t suck like they did. Who wants to pay to use a weblog site? And haven’t these people ever heard of databases? Why on earth are they ftp’ing the blog entries?

And so I wrote my manifesto. KillingMachines would become, with Steve’s help, and building on the base of FCS, the site I imagined. Users would be able to completely skin their journals. They could set their account to be either a personal journal, or a forum where everyone could post. They would automatically receive a subdomain for their journal. They could turn replies on and off. Most of these features were just pipe dreams at the time, but Steve helped me out a lot, and we got the site up and running, and eventually, only two major features were missing: User-defined skins for journals, and the ability to set an account to be either forum or journal.

I’m pleased to announce that I have finally gotten these features working, and KillingMachines is now FEATURE COMPLETE. I’ve got a few more tricks up my sleeve, but basically the site has everything it needs to be the best weblog site ever. I’m extremely proud of it, and I genuinely believe that given time, word of mouth will turn KMorg into a weblog powerhouse on the web!

And as if that wasn’t cool enough, something else is going my way! Recently, I got the idea in my head that it might be nice to have a Macintosh. The germ behind this idea is osX. This fine operating system is really fun to play with, and the fact that it’s built on a base of BSD makes it hard for me to resist. However, I’m not about to ditch my PC for a mac. I just like the idea of having one around to play with. As a result, I couldn’t justify spending $700 for a new one. Just today, I was mentioning to Annie that if I could find an iMac for around $300, I would probably buy it.

Well, today I may have found one. I’ve been talking with the owner, and she’s been looking to offload her old blueberry G3 iMac 333Mhz. I offered her $250, and things are looking good. Pretty soon, I might have a nice little mac sitting on my desk, waiting for me to grab a copy of osX!