LiveJournal to Blogger conversion/import tool - lj2blogger
Sept 29, 2007 update - An updated tool (renamed to Blog2Blog)is available see this post for download. Regardless, We will keep this post and the download around for posterities sake. My advice would be to try the current blog2blog tool which has better error handling and updated functionality but the choice is yours.
As unknown surprise to the Blogger staff that picked my blog for the blog of note, I've been working on a tool to import LiveJournal blogs into Blogger. I may as well post this today for all of you incoming viewers. I wish I had something witty and amusing to say in addition, but words fail. I am certain I'll think of something in a couple of days, my mind just works that way -- slow and steady?
Like many good ideas, this one came from my wife who wanted to migrate from LiveJournal to Blogger. I looked around and didn't find a conversion tool after several attempts to Google it. Thus, as a good software developer I spent the time to learn several things and build a tool.
Note, I would say this is a Beta at this point. It works well for the scenarios I've run it through. Please feel free to comment/suggest improvements through the blog comments.
Download lj2blogger (1.5.0 updated Feb 12, 2007)
The above is a .zip with a Windows installer. To install unzip and double click on setup.exe.
After installing there is a small manual:
"LiveJournal2Blogger Manual.rtf" at C:\Program Files\Cooley Computing Inc\lj2blogger\doc (default location).
To save you the time of opening this file it is below.
LiveJournal2Blogger (lj2blogger)
Introduction
This tool migrates a blog from LiveJournal to Blogger. It uses the public API of LiveJournal and the public API of Blogger to extract data from Livejournal and create equivalent entries in a Blogger account with the appropriate date/time of the orignal entry.
Features
- Download Journal Entries from LiveJournal
- A simple read-only viewer of downloaded entries
- Publish Journal Entries to Blogger
* upload private entries (it will make them public)
* parse entries and wrap http:// entries with HTML to make them active links
- Delete ALL entries for a Blogger journal
- Save/Load journal entries to/from file.
Usage
The designed usage pattern is below. For issues please feel free to contact me at pcooley.newsgroups at gmail.com.
Download from LiveJournal
1. Enter username (e.g. user1).
2. Enter password (e.g. pass1).
3. Enter lj-url (the URL of the livejournal you wish to download): http://user1.livejournal.com.
4. (optional) if necessary modify the api-url of your journal. This is autopopulated with a typical value.
5. Press Fetch from LiveJournal Button.
View Entries (optional)
6. Press View Entries Button.
7. Use the Entry Number Dialog to change the entry being viewed.
8. When complete Press the upper right close window (the X).
Save Entries (optional)
1. Press Save Entries
2. Choose the filename, it is an XML file with the extension (*.J2B)
Note: once saved you can load these Entries without downloading from LiveJournal (use the Load Entries button)
Publish to Blogger
9. Enter username (e.g. user1).
10. Enter password (e.g. pass1).
11. Enter lj-url (the URL of the livejournal you wish to download): http://user1.blogspot.com.
12. (optional) if necessary modify the api-url of your journal. This is autopopulated with a typical value. (if you have a non-upgraded blog take note; for non-upgraded blogs you will need to update the api-url! To find the URL you will have to look at the page source of your journal. See below for more information)
13. (optional) select options you please; publish private entries and/or wrap http:// with <a href=”…”>.
14. Press Publish to Blogger Button.
15. Select the Entries you will to publish (defaults to all entries).
Further instructions (non-upgraded blogs):
For non-upgraded blogs you will need to find your feed URI.
-- To do this you will have to use your favorite browser and type in the URL of you blog (e.g. http://user1.blogspot.com)
-- Using your browser you will need to 'View Source'. This differs slightly between browsers.
-- In the source look for link rel="service.post" type="application/atom+xml" title="User1 (Atom 1.0)"
-- The api-url is the http:// location in the href
Additionally it is not possible to post to an old journal with a new 'google' integrated account (for those of you that have only partially upgraded all your journals). Addtionally the publish dates of your livejournal won't be regarded. This is part of the API limitation.
Known issues
• The Application is not multithreaded – The UI refreshes slowly while connected to LiveJournal/Blogger.
• Does not import/export comment
• found 01/02/2007 - defaults for api-url only work with upgraded blogs.
• There are connection problems with the XMLRPC interface to livejournal, but immediately retrying Fetch from Livejournal seems to connect sucessfully. Just try a couple of times. No harm should be done.
It appears today I made the blogs of note on blogger.com Blogs of Note. Incoming hits galore!
Happy Blogging
Keywords: Blog migration tool, LiveJournal to Blogger migration, LiveJournal to Blogger conversion, transfer blog to Blogger, Import blogs from LiveJournal into Blogger, lj2blogger, livejournal2blogger, migrate livejournal blogger.
121 comments:
Will have to give it a shot... great blog, btw!
Visit Renegade's BS
life just good
great blog! Love your writing style! Have a happy New Year!
Great Blog!!!
Morgan Green
Uplifting Thoughts
This worker wonderfully, thank you so much. I was just looking through the "blogs of note" and thank goodness for this post. Thanks again!!
Sorry, worked, not worker, typing too fast!!
Love the linux
Glad lj2blogger worked for you missalimac.
I am glad to be able to share this tool and help others.
I love your blog! Thanks a lot! You deserve to be on the "Blogs of note list."
http://365cool.blogspot.com/
Keep up the good job!
Skateboarding Fan
I've been thinking about this for years!! But, is the tool reversable? For example..Blogger to LJ?
Cool. Very helpful.
I am running Ubuntu Linux on three computers as well as Windows and have been looking for something to post to my blog from my Linux machine.
I will have to try that thanks for the heads up.
Minako,
Currently the version 1.0 tool only goes from livejournal -> blogger. Maybe if I get some more time and enough interest I could spend the time to extend lj2blogger.
Paul
Well I tried it, but apparently having 280 posts on LiveJournal was too much for the program as it's throwing back an error that says Server returned a fault exception [206]: Client Error: Client is making repeated requests. Perhaps it's broken?
Any idea how to fix this?
Lee,
I'd be happy to work through this with you. I'll need to gather a little information to help me look in the right spot.
My immediate guess it is might be the transition from fetching chunks of posts (livejournal lets one download 100 posts at a time). It was successful on my wife's journal of ~195 posts.
Just before it fails can you let me know what the status bar says in terms of how many posts were already downloaded?
Paul
Thanks Lee for your help here.
I've released Version 1.1.0 with the bug that Lee found fixed.
It is can be downloaded at the link in the blog.
Paul
thanks for all the info....great blog.....happy blogging!
cheers
saty
dioscuri.hyd@gmail.com
Congrats on Blog recognition!
For those not quite so technical and maybe a laugh or two, check out di-ablog
Interesting reading, maybe too gray. How bout some variety of font/format, some photos, see wht I mean:
assertivenesssucceeds.blogspot.com
waterfallsuplift.blogspot.com
good luck
dave
good year
Saw you blog title on blogger, Linux is all the rage this season.
Happy New Year
The installer doesn't work with .net framework version 2.0. If you can distribute only the files without the installed it will be better.
LordDoskias,
I'll try and contact you and see if we can get this working for you.
Happy Blogging,
Paul
Enjoy your blog
and 'love' that you give the wife
credit for her input!
hjh
Nice pages here. Great information. Will visit again and recommend.
hi
great blog
see you then
kisses
I <3 Linux. I <3 your Blog.
-Andres
110141143153145162163040122165154145
thanks for your contribution.
any chance you might make one for xanga?
Currently xanga isn't on the radar.
Having issues when using this on my old blogger blog (which has recently been updated to use my Google account, etc).
Receiving the below message when trying to import LJ to blogger:
'Connection to Blogger Failed. Please try again. Exception: Execution of request failed: http://obscure411.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/full'
Funny thing is, it actually imported about 50 entries before this error occurred. Now I'm unable to get past it...
obscure information,
To start, I suspect this could be a Google/Blogger problem (to start with), I've seen it occasionally fail and then the next day work fine. It might be my implementation of their API, but I do pretty basic stuff.
Can you try again tomorrow (after deleting all your posts - to avoid duplication) and then republish?
Linux Lore
OK, tried again.
Attempt #1: Post beginning with the first post after failure.
Result: Failed, same error.
Attempt #2: Delete all posts from blogger.
Result: Success.
Attempt #3: Re-post from the first LJ entry forward.
Result: Imported the first 50 entries, and stopped at the exact same one as last time. Error message same as before.
obscure information,
Thanks for checking those scenarios. Sounds like an app issue. I can look at it later this week.
Please send an email I can contact you at to pcooley.newsgroups at gmail dot com. We'll dig some more once we chat a little.
It is likely some data in that particular post that lj2blogger should handle more safely.
Paul
Please notice that Blogger has implemented a 50 posts per day limit that I am attempting to work through with them:
Google Blogger API group
If you bump into this, now you know why.
Paul
In order to help with the 50 post per day limit blogger implement, I've implemented a post count before the blogger publish so that you can slowly migrate 50 posts at a time.
The new version is 1.2.0.
Hi, thank you for the community service. However, this is not working with me, since I'm getting these error messages: "invalid method", "client error: client is making a lot of mistakes (...)" and so on... Any guesses on what I might do?
Thanks in advance
* of course I meant "requests", not "mistakes"
JC,
Especially if this is with the connection and extraction of the journal from livejournal, I would attempt 5 or so times. There definitely seems like there is an API issue (either my code or the XML-RPC interface). However a good portion of the time it succeeds.
However, if that doesn't work please feel free to contact me at pcooley dot newsgroups at gmail.com and I can help.
I can't get it to download more than the first 400 entries on my livejournal. It doesn't give me any error messages and it tells me that the task is completed, but it stops somewhere in 2005.
Still, this is making miroring my blog to blogger much easier (it cut out more than half of the work already.)
You are my hero! My ex-livejournal blog looks just beauteous on blogger. Thanks, my fellow Washingtonian. Give everyone there a shout-out.
Michael Phillips,
Thanks for finding this one. It appears to be related to very large blogs > 500 entries. I've release a version 1.3.0 to correct for this.
Paul Cooley
hello, while i think this tool is fabulous it is not working for me. i am getting a similiar error message as lee had and i am using version 1.3
after hitting fetch from livejournal i am receiving the following pop up:
Connection to LiveJournal Failed. Please try again.
Exception: Server returned a fault exception: (406) Client error: Client is making repeated requests. Perhaps it's broken?
i am also trying to import 671 entries, any feedback is greatly appreciated.
thanks!
While expanding the unit tests for livejournal I discovered an issue with 24 hour time verses 12 hour time (AM/PM). (I created a test journal in live journal of 1200 entries within a 12 hour window - :-0). I've released version 1.4.0 to correct for this issue. It is unlikely to be the case that someone posted 100 entries in the same day, but still possible.
Please give it a whirl if you were having trouble.
whatshesaid, did you want to try this to see if it fixes your issue?
hrm, well i got farther than i did the first time but i get the same error after retrieving 98 entries.
whatshesaid,
Please contact me either at pcooley.newsgroups at gmail.com or respond to the email I sent to your comcast email address and we can see if I can find the issue with your blog and lj2blogger's extraction of it.
Paul
whatshesaid and all the rest,
I've released an update. The problem was in having a deleted post on a edge of a fetch cycle from the livejournal api.
Additionally, I've added a publish feature that partitions the posts into 50 posts sections to ease the new blogger 50 posts per day limit.
Paul
Paul,
It worked, and beautifully i might add. I have not had one problem fetching all 671 entries and publishing them in blogger (it did them all at once in about 10 minutes) and i didn't have to do 50 at a time.
Thank you thank you thank you for being so wonderful and helpful and figuring out everything.
-cyra
Heya, thanks for the awesome tool. It is the perfect solution for migrating from Livejournal to Blogger.
Unfortunately, it didn't work for me off the bat.
I got the following error:
Connection to Livejournal failed. Please try again.
Exception: Server returned a fault exception: [208] Client error: Invalid text encoding: Cannot display this post. Please see http://www.livejournal.com/support/encodings.bml for more information.
Instead of freaking out and assuming that link won't help you (like I did) go to the link and change your Unicode settings. That's what fixed it for me.
Again, thanks for the tool.
I am glad it worked for you. It sounds like there is a unicode issue with my use of the livejournal api. I will look through the code to see if it is quickly evident.
Paul
This tool seems amazing, but I was wondering if there was some way to hack around with some fields and make it work with Xanga.
Would it require much more work on your part? Is there a future for Xanga2Blogger?
I don't know if I can be much help, but if it is a matter of mundane tasks, I'd love to help.
Nathan
Nathan,
Looking again at the Xanga interface, it would take a little more than some tweaking of the UI. It would require another blog api implementation. This is not currently on my todo list given a few other projects I am working on.
Paul
it worked, it worked! thanks so much. you saved my night.
christie
Excellent. I am pleased it is saving some people time.
at record 301 of 1178, I am getting the following error:
"Exception: Response contains invalid int value [response : struct mapped to XmlRpcStruct : member events : array : element 82 : struct mapped to XmlRpcStruct : member props : struct mapped to XmlRpcStruct : member current_music : integer"
any help is greatly appreciated.
Hello!
Do you know of any Blogger to Blogger conversion/import tool?
I had several Blogs in Blogger and I would like to merge all of them into a single blog...
Thanks in advance for any help:
Bruno
http://planeta.terra.com.br/arte/lua/
http://bruno-wp.blogspot.com/
bruno.wp (at) gmail[dot]com
I get an error when trying to
"Fetch from Livejournal":
"Connection to LiveJournal Failed. Please try again.
Exception: Found an unexpected type while Inserting Journal Entries - expected a string or a byte stream"
Last action: Downloading 232 journal actions 101 of 232...
Any thoughts?
After reading your article ,I feel your opinion is interesting and special ,i hope that i have the chance to communicate with you . Could you check my blog at: www.muslimfriends.com/i/free to check my blog title: helenwang`s blog"? May be we can talk further and be friends.
Hi Paul,
what about import of comments not just entries?
I decided to skip the comments because it was a more complex interaction with livejournal. It is on my list of nice to-dos.
no worries, if you need more info from me or if you get it resolved, please let me know!
Thanks,
Mike
sick. the only problem is how scared I am of who I was 3 1/2 years ago. but that's really my problem not yours.
Great job, Paul.
Just tried this out and trying to download 348 journal entries, it stops at 201/348 entries with this error...
Exception: Found an unexpected type while Inserting Journal Entries- expected a string to byte stream.
Any clue to fix this? I've tried re-doing it numerous times but to no avail.
Any help would be much appreciated!
Caryn,
Thanks for dropping by. Actually that message implies that there is some data (encoding) in one of your entries that my little tool doesn't do the right thing with. A number of other people have encountered a similar issue and I have an idea for a better error message, but alas at the moment I am without a Visual Studios 2003 license. I am currently seeking one and hopefully will get one shortly.
In the meantime, there are two options. Wait on me. Or see if you can see an entry midway through your journal that looks suspect and change it (this is a needle in a haystack operation sorry).
Paul
Redrain,
The google query you seek is ".net 1.1 redistributable".
The MS download page:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=262D25E3-F589-4842-8157-034D1E7CF3A3&displaylang=en
Give that a whirl and let me know.
so i managed to install the lj2blogger program after a long time. but now i have a different problem.
the first time i tried to fetch from lj it loaded till 101 out of 492 and then stopped.
the next 20times i tried didn't even get to 101 but send me an error 406.
"server returned a fault exeption: 406 client error: client is making repeated requests. perhaps it's broken?"
sometimes it will get to 101 out of 492 but most of the time it doesn't even start fetching.
can you help me?
paul,
here is what it says:
exception: found an unexpected type while inserting journal entries - expected a string or a byte stream.
i don't know what to do.
Several others have run into the same thing (if you look above). I suspect it is a bug in the tool -- not handling a new post type in livejournal; unfortunately I don't have a license for Visual Studios and I am working on that. Then I'll be able to look further.
Interesting, I have been reading through the comments and, I appear to be the only one who has had a problem on the blogger side! LOL The fetch of 200+ entries went by quickly and easily. However, when I click on Publish to Blogger, I get an error message that seems to relate to my log in information which is correct. When I switched over to Google, my log in became my e-mail address and then my password was entered correctly (re-did the whole thing a few times to make sure I had no typos) and I get the following USELESS message:
"Connection to blogger failed. Please try again. Exception: Execution of authentication request failed."
Quinn Family,
That does sound like a login to blogger problem. However, it is difficult to say where the real problem is. I might suggest trying again in 24 hours.
It is probable that it will reproduce the same problem, but it is worth a try.
Paul
Hello -- I'm trying to import my LiveJournal (2500+ entries over five years) and I can't seem to be able to import more than 50 entries at a time. Do you know whether there is a setting in Blogger causing that and whether/how I can override it, by any chance? Thanks.
Hi, I was really hoping to use this program, but it stalls every time i try to "fetch" my live journal entires (~1000). It doesn't give me an error, nor do I see any progress on the progress bar. At some point, I can't even refresh the window. It doesn't close, but I can't really access it. Any advice?
Thanks
J, This doesn't sound like a typical problem. Two questions: (1) have you rebooted your machine and this still happens? (2) do you have a virus scanner that is blocking application access to the internet?
Paul
Hi Paul. Thanks for getting back to me so quick.
I have restarted the computer, re-installed the program, and still I get the same problem. I also deactivate my anti-virus software (AVG), and the same problem occurs. I have a relatively new Sony laptop, whatever that's worth.
I finally received an error... it said after hours of processing in a stalled state, "Exception: the underlying connection was closed. An unexpected error occurred on a receive".
Any idea?
Thanks again
J,
If you are willing to play ...
What happens when you use this tool to download your journal?
http://fawx.com/software/ljarchive
I am wondering if there is a lot to process.
Paul
Hi Paul,
I'm running LJarchive right now and it appears to be syncing fine. However, it has been going for like 4 hours, and God knows how much longer.
John
Hi Paul
Well, it kept trying to sync for all this time, and I've read a bit on the internet to realize that it wasn't really working.
Now what do you think?
Thanks,
John
J,
That is interesting . Did it ever finish? I am curious what is the speed of your network connection to the internet?
I never thought it would take that long to fetch a journal, so this program doesn't manage dropped connections well - that could be your problem.
Paul
nope it never finished. We have cable internet that is ridiculously fast. I also installed your program n my roomates computer and the same problem occurred. Hmmm
I should mention that it is not a matter of finishing because the lj2blogger stalls immediately and the progress bar never shoes any progress.
J
lj2blogger actually is trying to get a count of all the posts to start with. It is likely that it get hung up trying to fetch that much data? It does sound like you have a rather larger journal, is that true?
I've been systematically trying to discover a reason for your problem. Thank-you for your patience.
Hi Paul
I really appreciate the time you're taking to look into it. I have about 1000 journal entries, most with links to pictures that I host on my website.
John
J,
It appears we've went as far as we can go without sticking your journal into the debugger. If you are willing to play that sort of game, lets start up an email conversation.
pcooley.newsgroups @ g mail.com
would be the way to start this conversation and I'll respond back from an address that I use more regularly. Then we can put this in the debugger and see some further details.
Paul
Can this be used perhaps to save blogger entries and then import them to a new blog on blogger??? That would be REALLY nice.
Coincidently, I had been refactoring in the last couple of weeks and I've gotten part way to that solution. We'll see if that ends up passing the testing cycle sometime soon. ;-)
ooo please let me know if that works out. you would be my savior! lol
Hi, it's a great idea! Thanks.
I have a problem, the program fetches all my lJ entries, but for some reason doesn't let me import them in the blogger. It says that autentification for the blogger failed. No clue why.
Стаська,
Nothing strikes me as obvious. You might try the latest tool: Blog2Blog from here . Or maybe try again with publishing to blogger in 24 hours (their system had a problem)?
Paul
great ang useful! but there is some problem - windows...is there linux version for migration tool?
Currently this is only a Windoze app. Sorry.
I've just tried migrating my blog from Lj to blogspot using your tool- it migrated my 2006 and 2008 entries but not the 2007 ones. I can't figure out why...
You might try the latest tool Blog2Blog at here
hi! thx for the post.
can you suggest, however, how one can automatically publish LJ entries on Blogspot or vice versa? thx
I have 1500ish posts. Around 900 downloaded, I get the 406 error someone else was reporting awhile back, "Client is making repeated requests."
Help? :)
Dean,
lj2blogger has been 'upgraded' and has been renamed Blog2Blog to suit its newest functionality. Many bugs have been fixed.
Please read this post and try the latest download at Blog2Blog Post and download
Thank you so much for this. I wanted to clean out my livejournal and separate my blog and lj into different subjects, this worked like a dream. The only annoying thing is that you can only post 50 entries a day and it stopped at the first fifty, and I have quite a few entries so it will take awhile.
I keep getting an error that the application failed to connect to blogger. I'm trying to move lj entries to blogger. Fetching and loading entries works ok but nothing gets migrated to blogger. I tried with and without entering the long service.post URL in the blogger dest url space.
An updated tool (renamed to Blog2Blog) is available see the link in the post above for access/download.
I would love if there was a MAC version of this!!
Hi, my computer can't open the 'wipzip' file. Do you have another alternative way to download archives from Livejournal? :) Thanks!
K,
I'd advise you to both use the latest app: http://linuxlore.blogspot.com/2007/09/livejournal-to-blogger-or-blogger-to.html
and to use the following free extraction tool if necessary:
http://www.7-zip.org/
Hi! Thanks for the url and all! :)
But the problem now is that, I can't open the 7Zip file. I don't know why. Is there something wrong with my computer? I'm so sorry to trouble/disturb you!
Sounds like some sort of local problem on your computer. Maybe you could get a computer expert friend to check it out?
Okay, noted! Thanks a lot! :)
I'm just wondering, does it work opposite? Like Blogger to LiveJournal?
i haven't tried that. My guess is not because what the software does it grab LJ entries first.
Any updates or changes to the latest version that's posted here? I still can't get it to fetch all my LJ entries.
LJ changed their API, I've not been able to devote time to update the application. BTW the blog2blog app is the latest version.
^It would seem like it; that's why the tool no longer works. I should have made the decision to move a little sooner. *headslap*
Seems I would have to do the transfers manually. Yay to me.
the tool is long time outdated and doesn't migrate posts from livejournal to blogger. the developer seems to have stopped updaying the software. shit
Any plans to ever update this program? It doesn't work anymore with LJ. Gives an error "Failure to get all entries from Livejournal" and returns 0 entries.
This isn't being developer nor is its successor: http://linuxlore.blogspot.com/2007/09/livejournal-to-blogger-or-blogger-to.html
Thanks so much for the post, very helpful info.
site
Goodness, there is a lot of effective info in this post!
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I think, attribute values are not processed correctly by blog2blog:
The fed input:
<span style="font-family: &quot;Courier New&quot;,Courier,monospace;">
is interpreted as:
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">
which is incorrect, as quote is not XML-encoded (double decoding happended). The correct should be:
<span style="font-family: "Courier New",Courier,monospace;">
The best to do with blog2blog is to remove "Courier New", (with quotes and following comma) from saved file with posts, load hacked post from file and pull it.
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