Quantum-thoughtsBarefoot software engineer in pants!

My embarrassing search history will now also include the term: “How long to boil an egg?”

I’m 32 and I’d forgotten!

So far WordPress is proving to be “ok”. it’s just another blogging service after all except that I’m hosting it on my own site, which is itself hosted on a service somewhere “out-there” in the world at large.

I’ve managed to wrangle the plugins to handle cross-posting a bit better now, had to actually edit some of the php :/ a bit crap. Also the actual importing from LiveJournal just doesn’t seem to handle comments and for some unknown reason they removed the ability to import LJ’s exported XML files… Fuck knows why.

So you’re reading this because you want to get your comments from a LiveJournal based service (InsaneJournal, LiveJournal, Deadjournal, etc) then here’s what I had to do… it’s hilarious you’ll “love” it.

1. I had to find the fixed version of LJArchive which still works with LiveJournal – thankfully someone had paid to have it fixed!
2. use LJArchive to download your LJ, then export it to an xml file. Or if you have a lot of posts, split it into posts grouped by year NB: this is what I had to do.
3. Now go and grab version 2.6 of WordPress, it has to be an older version because they still had the xml importer back then. A slightly newer version like 2.7 might work which would avoid the manual upgrading step but this is just what I did!
4. Setup WordPress 2.6 but don’t go customising anything.
5. Go to Manage -> import ->LiveJournal, it will ask for your LJ xml file, upload it and import. If you have multiple xml files that you separated by year then just repeat it for each year, don’t worry if you upload one twice, it seems to handle that, mostly.
6. Once you’ve imported everything you need to “upgrade” WordPress 2.6 manually. This means you need to download the latest one, extract it and overwrite your WP 2.6 installation. There are instructions here.
7. You should now have your posts, your comments and everything else from LiveJournal AND if everything worked you’ll also have the latest WordPress.

Discovering this process was a pain in the balls, but actually doing it wasn’t too bad. Just a bit time consuming so I hope you have more luck whoever you are!

Thursday night was the Paradise Lost gig at the Rescue Rooms, or whatever that room upstairs behind it is called!

We got there I time to most of Vried play their set, which was interesting because when we arrived they were playing something that sounded really good, heavy, fast, lots of shouting etc and I thought “Oh good, loud, fast metal, shame we didn’t get here a bit earlier!” and then they went downhill a bit and I found most of the rest a bit disappointing in comparison. So it sounds like they can do good stuff but might be a bit hit-or-miss.

Insomnium however, well, I got home, slept, and then bought two of their albums as soon as my PC would boot. Really impressive, consistently great sound at the gig. Danni of course already knew about them but great discovery for me since they’ve got a good few albums out and I can do some catching up at my leisure! Currently deafening myself to them right now in fact.

If there was one downside to the Insomnium set then it was that they made Paradise Lost seem really flat and dull in comparison. Not really what you want for the headlining band that you’re there to see. They were good, solid performance and played songs I liked, I found the songs from the new album a bit off but then I hadn’t heard them before and they were amongst ones I had. Always a weird effect that, familiar vs unfamiliar songs from the same band always makes me feel like there’s something dissonant about them. Anyway rambling aside I ended up getting quite bored during their set!!! Sat and chatted for a while and drank too much beer for a week/work night.

Some good, some bad. One new band to follow plus I got to see a few friends I don’t see often enough. Actually “Regain The Fire” is just playing and it’s fucking awesome.

Adios!

I’ve been meaning to do this for some time, not leaving LiveJournal, but having a separate blog that is cross-linked.

It took some bloody effort to pull all the data across, mostly due to LiveJournal AND WordPress being crap at exchanging and sharing data. Specifically comments.

Well, lets see how this cross-posting and comment handling actually works then, by the way if you’re reading this on LiveJournal… it did ;)

Andy