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Migrating from Livejournal to Wordpress

Thursday, December 8th, 2005

Now that I’ve moved off of LiveJournal I want to encourage everyone else I know to do the same. To this end, I thought I’d write up how I migrated to Wordpress for the benefit of anyone else who might consider it, now or in the future. It was fairly time consuming, but not actually difficult in any way. Most of the time was spent figuring out how to do different things, not actually doing them, so these directions should help speed things up some for anyone else who’s interested in doing this.

Setting up Wordpress

The first thing to do is download and install Wordpress, either in your web space or, as I do, on a development machine while you get it ready to go up. System requirements are on their site but it’s basically just PHP and MySQL which are pretty ubiquitous.

I’ve found that the easiest way to customize the appearance of Wordpress was to use the theme browser to find a theme similar to what I wanted and use that as a starting point. This was much faster than starting from scratch and it got a lot of the tedious stuff out of the way so I could concentrate on my own style. For my site, I wanted to keep my existing look, so I chose Simple Green as a starting point. After installing the theme, I made a copy of it to a new directory, changed the name at the top of style.css, and started customizing. It’s easy to switch back and forth between themes from the Wordpress admin interface.

Exporting Livejournal posts

After you’ve got things looking the way you want, it’s time to import your data. There are two steps to this: 1) exporting from Livejournal, and 2) importing into your new MySQL database. Livejournal’s export tool is nearly useless in that they support exporting comments as well as posts, but don’t let you actually do it from here. Additionally, this tool does it one month at a time, which will take you ages to import if you’ve had your LJ for a while (I had mine nearly four years when I did this).

The way around this is to use ljArchive, a desktop application that can export your journal history, including comments, into one big XML file. It seems to do some other stuff as well, but I’ve only used it for this one thing so I can’t comment on the rest of its functionality. The down side to this program is that it only runs on Windows and even then requires that you have the .NET framework installed. I installed it on a Windows machine at work.

Once ljArchive is set up, the first thing you need to do is create an archive (File->New Archive): enter your LJ username and password, and tick the “Download Comments” box, if you want them (should be checked by default). After this all you have to do to is tell it to export your data: Go to File->Export->XML Writer, choose a filename and tell it to export everything into a single file. Below, in the “Export Settings” area, you can choose not to export protected (ie, friends-only) posts. It will export everything by default.

When ljArchive finishes doing its thing, you’ll be left with a big XML file containing your entire Livejournal history, posts and comments. Now you need to get this stuff into your database in a format that Wordpress can understand. Wordpress comes with scripts to import data from a variety of other systems (Livejournal, Movable Type, Textpattern, etc), but the Livejournal script, written for use with LJ’s export tool, doesn’t expect to see comments and so won’t import them. Luckily, Vinit Bhansali has made available a modified version of this script that will. Download import-livejournal.php from his site, replace the one that ships with Wordpress (in your wp-admin directory), and follow the Livejournal import instructions. Your comments will be imported along with your posts. I successfully imported 500+ posts and 700+ comments this way with no trouble, but it still might be a good idea to back up your database first.

Caveats

There are a few things to note about this procedure.

Comment threading will be lost

Protected posts are now public

Comments on imported posts will all be disabled

mysql> use <database name>;
mysql> UPDATE wp_posts SET comment_status = 'open';
mysql> UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status = 'open';
</database>

Abracadabra, your comments are all turned back on. The second UPDATE command turns trackbacks/pingbacks back on.

Posts with no subjects break permalinks

All posts are in the category “Uncategorized”

If you want to tag your posts outside of the standard categories, now is the time to decide, or else you’ll go through this all over again as you add tags (like I did). I’m using the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for this.

Empty comments

Syncing posts

If you want to have Wordpress copy posts to your Livejournal, use the Live+Press plugin. It allows you to choose whether to sync on a post-by-post basis and gives you the option of sending only an excerpt rather than the whole post if you prefer.

Update

I’d be interested in hearing how these instructions work out for anyone who uses them. Have fun!

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File under: blogs, how to, livejournal, software, wordpress