Livejournal -> Wordpress, round 1

[mattbell]

My first attempt to export my livejournal to wordpress.com was a bit of a mess.

First, livejournal has this proprietary "lj-embed" tag which means that my embedded videos and many photos won't export properly.  (The Dreamwidth export had the same issue.)  I could write a script to handle the conversion for the 120 or so affected entries, and maybe that's the easiest way around it.  I'm starting to think that it may make more sense to use the open source wordpress codebase and do manual hosting as opposed to just doing the standard wordpress.com offering.

Second, there was an option to import my protected lj entries as password-protected wordpress entries.  "Oh great, an extra backup!" I thought.  What the importer didn't say is that the titles of those entries would still be visible to everyone.  While I am okay with just about everything I've put on the internet eventually becoming public, I'd rather the provocatively titles private entries remain private for now. 

I'm debating whether it's worth exporting blog entries at all.  At first I had a vision of parallel blogs and automatic comment cross-posting, with the wordpress blog forming a more curated central web presence and the livejournal blog being more of a catchall blog and a place to more privately share some things with a limited audience.  However now I'm thinking the Wordpress site could just contain a selection of my best entries on various topics, with links back to livejournal for more details or a more complete picture.  It would still serve a function as a central web presence, but people poking around for more would end up at livejournal.

Comments

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

This seems to be what people are using posterous for, actually.

[proctologiste.livejournal.com]

I second this.

Posterous seems to have positioned themselves as a rival to tumblr, when in fact they are Wordpress-lite.

This is mostly correct, unfortunately, because Wordpress users would say "what about these billion features!", and they'd be right. Of course, they, and more importantly their readers, would be much better off with those zillions of fancy schmancy wordpress features.

Aaaand that's why I migrated from Wordpress to Posterous. Here:
http://posterous.com/switch/livejournal/

Just put in those deets, and they'll pull everything. If you don't like how they imported it, just delete that journal.

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

Awesome. I had assumed Posterous was a lightweight platform like Tumblr, so this is good to hear.

[proctologiste.livejournal.com]

Just in case it wasn't clear, I just noticed that I ommited a word in my above comment. I meant to say:
"... would be much better off without those zillions of [...] features"

[happyinmotion.livejournal.com]

This is something I'd also like to do.

*looks at huge list of things to do*
*notices this task near bottom of list*

So... if you can just write this and wrap it all up in a free tool where I just click one button and then it does exactly what I want it to do, no matter how complicated or unspecified my demands, then I'll be quite grateful. Cheers.

[serolynne.livejournal.com]

We pretty much came to the same conclusion. I manually copied over the LJ entries I wanted to seed the WP install with, and then just maintain two separate blogs from there. Although, I'm much more likely to link to a WP entry in my personal LJ, than the other way around.. but that's just a matter of the topic at hand.

Wiki

[dandv.livejournal.com]

I moved from Blogspot to LiveJournal and finally decided that most of what I write is about stuff that interests other people as well, and those people may want to add to it, as they can do on Wikipedia.

As I discover more information on a topic I wrote about, I'll need to edit my blog posts. Editing is a wiki activity. Would I mind if someone else improved on my blog post / wiki article? No, not really. It's still written mostly by me and appears as such immediately if one goes to the revision history.

So I switched from blogging to amassing knowledge on a wiki - http://wiki.dandascalescu.com/essays/difference_blog_wiki

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much for writing this up, as I am considering many of the same issues.