Fortunately, I didn’t post too much in the way of embedded content. This does blow on LJ’s part, though, and reinforces my decision to leave them. The screen scraper might be border-line w.r.t. LJ’s policy, but they can hardly blame us if they make exporting our own content so hard.

I was looking at the new importer (http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/wp-admin/import/livejournal.php) to see if they’re doing any magic for lj-embed, but it only seems to handle lj-cut and lj-user.

Just wanted to point out that I found a good procedure and set of patches to WP that enable threaded comments.. I followed them on a test set of data and it seemed to work flawlessly. I haven’t tried them since I wrote convertdump.py (I still haven’t actually pulled the trigger on switching to WP from LJ yet), but I see no reason why they wouldn’t work..

http://rusty-halo.com/wordpress/?p=2256 http://rusty-halo.com/wordpress/?p=2535

The second article specifically deals with threaded comments, but I found both articles useful.

Also, be sure to note that there is no way for convertdump or ljdump to handle “lj-embed” tags. LJ’s XML-RPC protocol doesn’t provide a mechanism to request that these tags be expanded to include the embedded content.

So if you ever posted any YouTube videos or the like to your blog, you should be sure to copy them over manually. I’m going to be adding a feature to convertdump which will flag any entries which contain lj-embed tags to make it easier for you to do this. I’ve also toyed with creating a third tool which will use something like the Mechanize library to crawl LJs site to get the content of the lj-embed tags that way. I think that would be more useful to users who have quite a bit of embedded content. It probably runs afoul of LJ’s policies, though. :)