Posted on January 14, 2009 - by sarahsamudre

Saving My Livejournal

What’s not “about to fall apart” these days? We were discouraged from giving gift cards at the holidays because businesses are filing Chapter 11 right and left, people are moving banks because of rumors that a financial institution is about to fail, and it seems that nothing right now is stable enough for us to trust in. Economic forecasters say this recession will last through the third quarter of this year, and we’ll probably not feel any upturn until 2010.

So with that in mind, it shouldn’t shock anyone that LiveJournal may be in trouble too…

LiveJournal, after many management changes, is again having problems LiveJournal deletes ‘about a dozen’ jobs | The Social – CNET News. It’s not a surprise, since many of the most stable institutions are having problems, that LiveJournal is as well. There is even rumors here and there that LJ may shut down for good due to recession problems and problems keeping up with the newer blog sites and social networks.

I’m new here on Wordpress, but I’ve been on LJ for years, and I’ve tried to maintain my journal, even as our friends migrated onto greener e-pastures. Sites like WordPress have already started advertising LiveJournal specific import tools so you can relocate your journal to a more stable host LiveJournal Migration Made Easy « Blog « WordPress.com.

So I started looking through the options for downloading my journal, just in case. Since moving here and seeing the above Wordpress bulletin, I started looking to make an xml file of my livejournal posts. I found a lot of good Mac download clients for LiveJournal (I settled on xJournal). But sadly, I soon realized that any client making an xml file would only grab my posts. No comments.

The comments, for many present or formerly hardcore lj-ers, was the REASON we loved LiveJournal. I mean, CRAP, my goddaughter would not be alive if it weren’t for the discussions that happened in the comment sections of livejournal. Friendships, family, drama, encouragement, good jokes and great stories unfolded in the comment sections. That is a hard thing to let go of- to realize seven years could soon disappear without any archive.

But that brings me to my great discovery!!!

LJBook (Turn your blog into a PDF Book)!!!!!!

This site is a free service that will take your livejournal, no matter how big, and turn it into a book: posts, comments, all security levels, even archiving the moods and music for a given post. The pdf is nicely laid out, and you can set it so it starts a new post on a new page, and it preserves ALL THE COMMENTS. You can archive journals, or whole communities. If you have a LiveJournal, you just need to log in to your journal on their site, select the conversion preferences, and make sure you’ve converted your journal from the old format: Change Old Encoding Settings. Go to that page and if your livejournal has mainly been written in English, select Western European (windows) and hit “Save”. LJ Book will be able to convert your journal and ALL the comments therein into a lovely pdf book that you can download to your computer, and print even (the site recommends Lulu.com)

Anyway, I’m here now, on Facebook, Twitter, and so while I still use my livejournal, I’m on it less and less. I’m just glad that I know the years of journalling and community formed over the comments there will be archived now.