Migrants to IJ, 2007

(Originally for LiveJournal, then I thought better of it. All user-links are to LJ!)

EDITED: 16 August 2:00pm CT.

I am going to update this when I can, but please do not consider me the expert here. I have not checked all these links and the list is definitely incomplete. This is in many ways repeated in elke_tanzer's fantastic link post, just grabbing the tech links in one place!

So please comment! I hope that you can all help me mine the flists for technology links, make corrections, and generally put it all in one place. Because honestly, even with a slow connection and multiple journals? Moving it all shouldn't take more than three days. Download the tools, clean up where you are, spread out where you'll be.

First off, be very awake when you do any of this!!

Frequently Forgotten (At least, by me.)

• Save your profile and layout and styles and links and custom mood themes. That color scheme may not be default everywhere. Users of certain layouts: save your sidebar boxes.


• Save your userpic keywords. Staying and switching to Basic? Add in all your unwanted icons' keywords (with commas, e.g. "happy, whee, joy!, pretty ass") into the appropriate kept icon, *then* delete your unwanted icons. Otherwise icons will be eliminated according to usage and your entries will revert to the default.


• If you have a scrapbook, ditto.


• If you have a Paid account and are switching to Basic, save your layers first! Go to the last tag in Customize and c/p your active layer. Paid accounts in most other sites will allow you to use that public layer and your own style's layer. See below.


• Polls remain iffy. Locate them and save those posts.


• Tags remain iffy.


• Filtered entries remain iffy. Some have reported those custom groups ending up in the 'Family' filter of IJ, for instance.


• Got communities? Get a co-mod. It's good practice anyway if something untoward happens to you.


• New journal service? Remember to adjust your privacy (e-mail, birthdays), IP logging, comment settings, and spider-bot restrictions ASAP.


• MULTIPLE SERVICES You CAN follow journals on other systems. Blogrolls like Bloglines and Google Reader will pick up your RSS feeds. That includes most anyone operating a non-LJ blog.


• FRIENDS LIST All systems with LJ architecture will allow mass-friending. Copy your friendslist to a text program, and do a find and replace with the commas: friend add username, then enter the list into the Admin Console (usually /admin/console/).


• Do not create RSS feeds identical to the original journal. That can prevent the owner from claiming that name. I.e. liondragon_gfeed instead of liondragon.


• fandom_flies: Check feed restrictions.

How to Pack Up & Leave LiveJournal (A Tutorial) Overview and links!
Entries, userpics, memories, voice posts, comments the-hard-way, scrapbook.

The Tools

Your (paid) fans:
JF: rename_me JournalFenistas are taking steps to rectify any user-name discrepancies.
_getajournal_
leavin_eljay (JF codes?)
fandom_flies
Set up syndicated feeds.

Paid fans:
almostnever offers to migrate your journal for a fee. Tis a review, though.

LAYOUT, CSS
GJ musycal_test noted how to migrate your layout and CSS. At first glance this looks like it needs a paid account.

LAYOUT: SMOOTH SAILING and FLEXIBLE SQUARES
Our own nameless_layout snagged the layers here.
Also seems to require a paid account.

LJ-sec:
OLD ENTRIES brown_betty's helpful tag - backing up your LJ (Windows)
Be SURE you know what server you're logging into! If you press the button, be sure it's really doing what you want it to do.
Journal > Refresh All Items maybe required in addition to Resynchronize.
Make sure it's back-dated!
I also tried BlogBackupOnline to go from blog to LJ. Not sure if it's good for the other way around.

(G-mail):
copperbadge: how to separate your 'sensitive' journal from your personal journal. Please not to be abusing that for illegal activities, thanks.

COMMUNITIES, OLD ENTRIES antennapedia: journal migration tool: Python (Mac OS X, most Linux, Windows w/ Python)
Moving communities, apparently.

Semagic:
NEW ENTRIES snapetoy has posting to multiple journals.
Check the comments for the helpful screencap.

TAGS
Our own lilbreck shows us how to fix up tags to post to InsaneJournal. Be careful with this one -- registry keys are v. important.

Firefox:
MEMORIES, USERPICS, SCRAPBOOK
DownThemAll! extension helps you grab the aforementioned memories, userpics, and scrapbook.
Remember to un-check the LiveJournal links!
For Memories I checked all, started the download, then told it to Ignore all the "edit.bml" so it only grabbed the Memories. (People with sensitive public entries -- if you don't want them backed up, lock them down!)

FRIENDS LIST
FeedReader3:
aithine has how to access posts via RSS feeds.

YOUR JOURNALS = ONE LINK
(Bloglines)
memorycharm has a guide: setting up, pros/cons of RSS feeds.
I have not tested this, but it occurs to me that you can give your viewers ONE link for all your journals. I set up a blogroll at Bloglines where you can click on a folder to view all its feeds. It's a public blogroll -- and I imagine I could subscribe to the RSS feeds of all of my own blogs and journals and offer it to the public as a single link.
Same limits on RSS apply, such as public posts only and the one-way nature of comments.
Our own the_willow has a guide for setting friends levels for RSS feeds.

OLD ENTRIES, USERPICS, COMMENTS
LJArchive:
Preserves pretty much everything to your hard-drive, including comments. I have not tried it to transfer journals.

LJBook:
Same deal, with PDF file.

Wordpress:
amireal is collecting widgets.

TINY LJ DUDES
Fake LJ-User Tag Generator
Via our own srz_bznz: http://dreamthoughts.org/box/lj.html

Untested:
http://ljsm.feechki.org/index_en.html
http://www.thejackol.com/2004/05/29/the-livejournal-backup-toolkit/

In development:
LJ: Scribblit twocorpses
minotaurs has a great idea about one web interface for all the journal services.

Still needed: tools for Macs, and the forwarding services and sites.