I was going to wait to post about this until I had the journal up and running for public viewing, but I had so much fun last night I have to talk about it now.
[lj-cut]I started writing a Xanga journal a few years back, as the story goes, I made the journal so I could organize the reading of other journals on that site, I didn’t intend to actually keep a journal, this was before blogging was a big thing so I saw it as a “diary” and I wasn’t much of a “diary” girl.
But I was bit by the bug. Within a week I was writing regularly. My writing skills sucked, going back and reading those is somewhat painful. I’m amazed that people actually read that crap (thanks to those who put up with me in those early days!).
I moved to LiveJournal in the end of 2002 because so many real life friends were using it, then
When I made this move (well, sort of move, I updated Xanga AND LJ for a few months) I realized that I was addicted. This is when I first considered moving the entire thing to princessleia.com. But I liked the LJ community, so I couldn’t leave that behind.[/lj-cut]
Over the past few years I’ve thought about running a blog from princessleia.com several times. There were a few things that came up:
- I couldn’t leave LiveJournal completely, still have post there
- Posting to LiveJournal AND my own journal is too much work when lj-specific tags and such are taken into consideration
- I don’t want to fight the comment spam war on my server
But on the flip side, I was always uncomfortable with depending on a 3rd party to keep my journal entries safe, I had to start keeping backups locally.
When people started using WordPress with the LJ auto-update tool I thought that most of my problems would be solved. But it took me a while to warm up to it, Michael’s now been using it for months. The only oustanding issue was comment spam, well who says I need to enable comments at all? While driving home last night I decided I would have my blog on PrincessLeia.com!
That’s what I did last night.
First I had to export all of my entries to CSV XML. LJ only allows you to do this month by month, but at least they provide a tool for it unlike some services. I thought about only taking 2004-2005, since I was such a bad writer in 2003! But then I realized that I would probably always cut off anything written more than 2 years ago forever in my life because my skills have improved that much more. So I decided to start in the beginning of 2003. Close to 3 years of LiveJournal entries.
Then I used the livejournal import tool included with WordPress to pull all the entries into my fresh WordPress install. It was around mid 2004 that I began using LJ-Specific tags – which wordpress wouldn’t see! This was not such a problem for lj-cut, but it was a considerable problem for the lj user tags.
I thought about search and replace options which would allow me to replace lj user tags with a link to their livejournal or just their usernames or something, even asked some vim gurus what they suggested for the actual replacement method (use perl! use awk!). Then I thought about it. If importing your LiveJournal entries into wordpress is a popular enough practice for them to INCLUDE an import tool, someone must have encountered this problem before.
I hit up the wordpress site and found a hack that solves this problem. Not only does it solve the lj user problem, it provides a simple (but clever) lj-cut solution! I figured I wouldn’t use the lj-cut thing, but if it works, why not?
I excitedly imported all my livejournal entries. Happy at how well it was all going. Once complete I started browsing them. That’s when I real
ized something was not completely right! It was showing lj user tags from 2 years ago, but not most recent ones. Was it because I installed the hack at a certain time while importing? Was it some problem with the usernames it was displaying? Was it how I wrote the tags?
It was how I wrote the tags, LiveJournal let me be lazy! In the beginning I always included quotes, like <lj user=”time3″>. But then I realized it worked fine without quites, so I got lazy, and it turned into <lj user=time3>. The script only saw it with quotes! But lucky for me it used a simple regex to determine what it sees and replaces, so a quick edit to the regex makes it so it’ll see either.
By the time I got to this point it was 10PM and I went to bed. But I was excited, I hadn’t had a feel-good, successful computer project in a while.
Tonight the mission is to get my own design put in (same as the rest of PrincessLeia.com) and to get the lj auto-update script up and running. Then I can start giving the address out!