Is there a compact way of saving an old Livejournal?

October 7, 2019 1:48 PM

I had a LiveJournal for a long time. At some point I did the LJ Book thing which saves it as a pdf--a pretty big file. I'm wondering if there's a way to save those old entries just as text, something I could print out and shove in a box in a closet to read some day since LJ itself will probably go away (and is already sort of a disaster.) I think the file I had was hundreds of pages because it saved a lot of formatting stuff. Thanks for any pointers. I've googled, obviously, but didn't find anything useful.
posted by less of course to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

This is what a friend of mine did (link is not my friend but a good guide).
posted by fiercecupcake at 2:02 PM on October 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

Is your LiveJournal account still active? If so, there are various tools that can export your entries. A quick Google found this, but if you're not comfortable with command line stuff, it might not be a great option for you. There are also tools that can migrate a LiveJournal account to a WordPress site, which can make it easier to export it again to other formats.

If you no longer have an account, you'll probably need to use a tool to rip the text out of the PDF.
posted by SansPoint at 2:03 PM on October 7, 2019

It's not clear from the question if your Livejournal account is still online. If it is but you can't use the export tool you could try to mirror it with wget or httrack.
posted by Bangaioh at 2:47 PM on October 7, 2019

Can you just select all the text in the pdf and copy-paste?
posted by notsnot at 2:53 PM on October 7, 2019

You could also (as a temporary solution) mirror your LJ to Dreamwidth, which is built on a fork of LJ's code, but its owners are committed to being sustainable and around for the long haul. And as a bonus, they're Good People.
posted by Tamanna at 3:30 PM on October 7, 2019 [5 favorites]

I did not find a good option. I spent several hours over some days saving every page as a PDF (using just print to pdf in my printer settings off the browser) and then combining them as one big PDF binder. It was labor-intensive but the file is pretty small and very readable.
posted by epanalepsis at 5:58 AM on October 8, 2019