LJ to WordPress

This is a hopefully temporary measure to be able to import your LiveJournal to a WordPress blog. See some discussion here.

For an example, here's my LiveJournal and here's my WordPress blog.

What does it do?

• Preserves post titles, dates, and content
• Can optionally import protected posts from LJ and set a password on them in WordPress.
• Keeps a similar URL scheme, so a link to http://gregstoll.wordpress.com/495263 will bring up the post originally made at http://gregstoll.livejournal.com/495263.html
• Fixes links to other LJ entries in your journal to point to the corresponding WordPress entry
• Preserves comment bodies, including nesting
• Preserves tags
• Turns <lj-user> tags into a link to that user's LiveJournal

What does it not do?

• Does not preserve mood, music, or location
• Does not copy anything else from your journal other than posts (i.e. no blog title, global links, etc)
• Does preserve the name of the author of comments, but if it's anyone other than the journal author it makes no attempt to set the author's URL, etc
• <lj-cut> tags don't get displayed, although their content is displayed
• Does not set any excerpts for posts
• Does not preserve userpic or any images you have stored on LJ
• Does not preserve the author of posts (all will be set to the owner of the journal), so this probably won't work well with communities
• Does not convert <lj-embed> tags

Caveats

• The way LJ formats posts is a little weird, which doesn't play nice with some WordPress themes. For example, the Franklin theme has weird spacing for <br>'s.

How to use this

• First, use LJBackup to make a backup of your LiveJournal
• In the resulting .zip file, find allPosts.xml
• Send an email to greg@gregstoll.com with subject "LJ to WordPress", and include the following:
  • Attach the allPosts.xml file
  • The URL of your WordPress site
  • Whether you want protected posts to convert, and if so, what password you want set on them
• After I reply with your WordPress XML file, go to WordPress, and click My Site->Settings
• Click the Import section
• Under the WordPress importer, click Start Import, then click on the cloud icon and select the WordPress XML file you got back
• Click through a few more times, then wait a while :-)

Source code

Here's allPostsToWordpress.py, which does the conversion from allPosts.xml to a WordPress-compatible XML file.