Made of fail

[trinityvixen]

Some of you who have been panicking over LJ shutting down have been looking for alternatives. I suggest LJ Archive--saves the format all right, you can resync the same archive and thus don't need several copies to cover the months missed by the last backup.

The other best option that I've explored would have been LJ Book. I say would have because after having the FAQ, I have determined that there is no way in hell anyone is getting a book out of them any time soon--regardless of whether they sucker you into paying them not to do jack shit for you. Because they only allow 2-3 books to be made per hour. That is just not a feasible solution when literally thousands of people (to say nothing of communities) are probably rushing about trying to figure out how to save their journals.

Any other solutions people have found, please do share, and best of luck to you.

Comments

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

I only heard vague references to the shutdown (my LJ friends seem strangely unperturbed, overall) but I downloaded LJArchive and saved my entries, so thanks for the tip. I'd hate to lose LJ, though. Facebook is extremely dull in comparison.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I would just hate to lose the information. There's so much of my writing there.

[shell524.livejournal.com]

Ah, that reminds me. I downloaded LJ Archive yesterday afternoon and didn't get to mess with it before the virus problems. *Goes to download 7 years of journal entries...*

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

About that virus--what happened? I mean, did the LOLCat page ever cotton onto it? Because I'd write an e-mail to the site master to let them know before anyone else gets attacked.

[shell524.livejournal.com]

I would e-mail them, but I have no specifics other than "I got a trojan while browsing your site." I don't know which ad, which page, or anything. I mean, I guess that's more useful than nothing, but to be honest, I'm kind of afraid to even load the site to find e-mail addresses.

[saikogrrl.livejournal.com]

Er, WTF? Lj is shutting down for good???????? O_@

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

No, not shutting down for good, that's just what everyone is panicking about.

LJ had a massive downsizing that got reported as being fully half the work force, but that turns out not to be the case. Regardless, there was a round of lay-offs, which spooked people. In any case, people should be backing up their shit. Hence suggestions in this post.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

I downloaded LJArchive, and it appears to have worked. I had it export everything as an html file, which I may in turn use DoPDF to turn into a pdf. Some of the memes are a little screwy, and it didn't capture most people's LJ Icons in comments, but otherwise it all appears to be there.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I'm having the same issues. Whenever it is I'm sufficiently bored (which could be today!), I will start monkeying around with it and see if I can figure out if there's some other download that would fix that. Truthfully, a lot of the memes might just be broken links at this point, so that doesn't worry me.

I didn't think to save it as an HTML, but that's an idea. What's DoPDF?

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

The first thing I did after saving it was look for a way to export it in a common format: I don't want to be locked into LJArchive's format any more than I want to be stuck with everything online. There are options to export as HTML, MIDI and XML.

DoPDF is a pdf-making utility you can download for free online. It functions like a printer driver, so anything you can print, you can save as a PDF. I've used it to save online recipts and transfer Word files into pdfs.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

That's pretty brilliant. It sounds similar to a function that the Safari browser I have at work offers--you can view anything to be printed as a PDF before printing it. I will have to download it. Because, like you, I like LJ Archive, but the format is not eminently readable and I'd like the option of backing it up and un-installing LJ Archive if I so chose.

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

Another option is ljdump, which does save an LJ directly as XML. It stores comments and entries in separate XML files, though, and does not try to recreate the page layout, so it's probably not what you want. I'd best get on trying to figure out how to convert this guy to pdf format, as that probably would be nice...