Quantum-thoughtsBarefoot software engineer in pants!

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!