Amanita.net

DRAG AND DROP!
You should now be able to do the conversion easily by yourself, thanks to the Drag and Drop LJ into MT script published at ScriptyGoddess! Please note that I have no information about this script and I have not even tried it myself…but before contacting me to do your conversion, please try this first. Then, if you really need to, you can ask me for help. It’s faster when you do it yourself, too – I promise!

So you’d like to import all your LiveJournal entries into Movable Type. It’s not as hard as it looks, but there are a few things you need first.

• Whether you’re doing this on your own machine or someone else’s, you need to be able to work with Perl. In most cases, you will need shell access to your server to mess with it.
• dburr’s lj2mt script. This is the program that does the dirty work. (Just in case his goes down, I’ve saved a mirror of the script.) Make sure you remove “.txt” from the end before attempting to work with it!
• You will need the XML::Node and Date::Parse modules installed; if they’re not present you need the ability to install modules (both permissions and know-how).

• Note: The XML::Node module requires both XML::Parser and XML::Parser::Expat, both of which are available from CPAN.

Once you’ve got everything in place, you’re ready to export your LiveJournal entries. This should be done in Internet Explorer if at all possible, due to apparent problems with Netscape’s parsing of line breaks.

• Log in and go to the Export Journal page.
• Export what: Journal Entries. Currently this is the only option.
• Select month: Fill it in yourself. You do have to do this month by month for every month you’ve been keeping a LiveJournal.
• Format: XML. Won’t work any other way.
• Header: Checked. I don’t think this affects anything if you’re exporting to XML, but I’ve always left it checked and it doesn’t hurt anything.
• Encoding: Unicode (UTF-8). It will break if you set it to anything else. This may result in foreign or accented characters being transformed into something else, but it’s easy enough to correct using MT’s search-and-replace function.
• Fields: Event Time, Subject, Event. You can add others if you like, but these are the only ones that will be imported into MT. If you download the script from my server (see above), you can also export the mood and music information, which is appended to the entry in MT.
• Proceed, and then go to File > Save As… to keep the results. You must save it with a “.xml” extension; saving it as text and then just changing the extension to “.xml” won’t work. Call the file whatever you like, “2002-02.xml” or “july01.xml” or something useful like that.

The next step is do actually do the conversion.

• Put the lj2mt.pl script and all of your XML files into the same directory.
• To run the script, type lj2mt.pl july01.xml mt-name > july01.mt at the command line – “mt-name” should be replaced by your login name for Movable Type.
• You will see it process each entry; on a fast computer they will fly by too quickly to read but you’ll be able to tell it’s working. If it doesn’t process each entry in this way, something is wrong.
• Repeat the command for each month you’ve exported from LiveJournal, changing it to lj2mt.pl aug01.xml mt-name > aug01.mt as appropriate.

You’ll now have a collection of “.mt” files. The Movable Type manual contains instructions on importing entries, but I’ll mention a few things here, along with a few final notes.

• It’s probably a good idea to do a test with just one of your “.mt” files first. Once those entries have been imported successfully, delete that file from the import directory, and put all the rest in there. It’s fine to do a whole bunch all at once.
• After everything is finished and you’re happy, go ahead and delete the “.xml” and “.mt” files, you won’t need them anymore.
• Note that MT has no support for private or friends-only entries. If you import ‘em, we’ll see ‘em. The only way around this is to set those entries to “Draft” after you’ve imported them.
• There is currently no way to export LiveJournal memories. You will have to establish MT categories for each Memories category, and set it all manually.

Rebuild, and you’re all set!

REALLY CONFUSED? Don’t worry, I can do (some of) this for you. It took me a really long time to get all this working, and it takes me just a few minutes to import even a few years of entries. Send a zipped package of your XML files to lj2mt@amanita.net, and leave a comment here or e-mail me to let me know you’ve sent the file. I’ll send back a zipped package of “.mt” files for you to import.