At least I have someone to blame

[susandennis]

I just killed a couple of hours screwing around with backups and ideas and fails. And, it's all legalmoose's fault. He wrote about his WordPress clone of LJ. I have a domain and a hosting service that provides free Wordpress. Why don't I use that as my backup of Dreamwidth!

Turns out it's because no.

Dreamwidth doesn't backup anywhere. I found one bit that said LJ Archive could be used for Dreamwidth. Heck, it can hardly be used for LJ these days but I tried it and it throws out an error about my password which is not wrong so there must be something else.

I did finish the LJ Archive of my complete Live Journal and then put each year into its own web page now on my PC and on Google Drive. I'm done with it and full satisfied.

But Dreamwidth is a mess in terms of backup. About the only thing I can find is what they offer, CSV or XML - of each month. No comments. Piss poor but better than nothing and since it's still new, at least I can add it to my 1st Day Of The Month todo list and that's perfectly doable.

I can find no way at all to clone to wordpress which is fine. I really don't want a wordpress site.

I did go to Goodwill and unloaded the car. Whew. And to the grocery and didn't forget anything. Wow.

And then home to get sucked down the backup rabbit hole.

I just took the garbage and the recycling down to the dumpsters. My chores are done for the day.

And we just lost power. WTF?

Comments

[meowmensteen]

What is going on with the power? Parts of Magnolia lost power yesterday morning. The bakery didn't, and we were SLAMMED! People needed their morning coffee and food.

[susandennis]

I saw that yesterday and wondered if you got hit. The eta for restore is 45 mins from now. I sure hope they stick to that. Or sooner.

[spacefem]

i've been messing with copy/pasting my month-by-month csv archives together lately, I got all of 2019 in one book. the lj book thing was giving me fits this time around.

I play with it, then get distracted and don't care, and I can never figure out if I like archiving my comments.

[susandennis]

That's the thing. Who the hell cares? I did the LJ Archive thing because I was always looking for something in my LJ and the app sucked but it's search function was killer. I think I'm actually fine with CSV and no comments. I think.

[loganberrybunny]

I don't think DW has ever really had the intention to replicate all the features that LJ has -- at least, that LJ had when it used to work properly. It's not quite a shoestring operation, but I'm not sure they have the resources to do much more than we get now. Admittedly I have a free account, so there may be lots of nice stuff I'd need to pay for.

[kaishin108]

Oh no, your power! Yikes, hope it goes back on soon...

[legalmoose]

Glad I could help you waste a few hours. ;)

There used to be a WordPress plugin that would easily cross-post things to LJ. It's been so long since I used my old site that I'm not sure it still works, but when it did it was relatively easy to post and auto-cross-post. A shame LJ isn't playing nice with DW any more, either. I'm currently still cross-posting and reading both sites, but it's the copy-and-paste method for now.

[spiffikins]

Can I ask what you did to export LJ Archive and import it into web pages? I tried using the LJ Archiver app - and I managed to download my LJ - but when I try to export it, it just seems to die.

[susandennis]

File>Export>HTML Journal writer. Select, how you want the result (year or all in one) and hit enter. Did my 20 years in about 3 mins.

[spiffikins]

Hmm, I will have to give it another go and see if I can coerce it into spitting out the html for me!

[thestainlesssteelrat]

I did briefly look into whether ljArchive was Dreamwidth compatible, but the suggestion was not, and I have a copy of LiveJournal, so wasn't too fussed. I'm 50/50 about ljArchive. Great that it exists and love the searching, but it's a sensitive beastie and I'm concerned it will die and I won't be able to access the file (I could do the monthly exports from Dreamwidth but that's a lot of work).

[gwendraith]

I don't know what LJ Archive is. I always backed up LJ with LJ Book which saved every post with an index + pictures, comments and tags to a .PDF. Maybe that's what LJ Archive is? For DW I back up with BlogBooker which is the same as LJ Book was and offers a choice of LJ type platforms as well as blogger, wordpress and other platforms. I have 20 years worth of books.

[peaceflower]

I must be a odd one since I always just downloaded my posts each month. LJ and DW have an export tool for that. Those have always been my backups. Not as pretty as having it on a website but for me better than nothing. I always preferred having a copy on my computer mostly due to me keeping my own journal on a laptop for some years. So then I just pasted in the LJ posts between other days I wrote. Also I kept paper journals for decades and transcribed those into Word so now those are in time in line with LJ posts in my docks. I only write on DW now so it helps keep organizing it all easier.