Help Me Book-ify My Old Livejournal

August 21, 2016 4:46 PM

The last time this question was asked was back in 2009, so just wanted to see if anyone had any advice or recommendations for getting a super old LJ printed into some sort of keepsake book.

I had a LiveJournal through most of high school and I would like to make sure, god knows why, my angsty emo teen scribbling is preserved somehow.

I saw this older question that recommended using a service called LJbook, but LJbook has been replaced with another service called BlogBooker. It looks like you then upload these PDFs to Lulu.com to actually print out as a book. Just curious if anyone had any advice on whether this is still the best way to go for this kind of project.

Ideally the service makes it easy to print all of the hundreds of entries and comments into some sort of pretty, readable, holdable physical format. I don't mind paying cash money, particularly for something that will look nice. It would be neat to be able to keep some of the formatting from the posts (images, the little mood and music dealies), but that's not required.

Also, curious if anyone has any general advice on digital preservation for this kind of thing. Seems like you can't really beat old fashioned paper.

posted by forkisbetter to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

If you're on Windows, this version of LJ Archive works for me, although some Windows users have reported that it doesn't for them - http://www.acidqueen.de/lja/LJa.html

Here's another link about LJ Archive that links to the above one just in case - http://www.dehavelle.com/2012/03/lj-archive-fixed/

The Mac back up utility can be found here - https://sourceforge.net/projects/ljkit/

You can export your old entries from here - http://www.livejournal.com/export.bml

You might try asking on http://thequestionclub.livejournal.com to see if anyone else has recently published their LJ to PDF - I haven't tried it. Good luck!
posted by Calzephyr at 7:07 PM on August 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

I believe BlogBooker actually acquired LJBook, so it's the same thing under the hood. I recently used it to back up 14 (!) prolific years of LJ entries and ended up paying for the "premium" service plan because it didn't work at first. It turned out there were some corrupt settings that they had a tool to reset. Good news is the support did their job, so if you have issues it's easy to throw money at the problem and actually get a reply - unusual for anything livejournal-related these days since it is basically a dead platform.

The generated PDF looks fine. It's not gorgeously typeset or anything but I didn't really explore the options as I wasn't planning to print it. I don't think there exists a one-stop shop for this kind of thing.
posted by the marble index at 8:44 PM on August 21, 2016 [1 favorite]

And I think you can do some amount of your LJ for free on BlogBooker if you want to try it out. Nothing to lose, right?
posted by the marble index at 8:45 PM on August 21, 2016

Do it, Sokka!!!!
posted by wenestvedt at 12:13 PM on August 22, 2016