Livejournal import fails silently

  • I made an XML file from Livejournal postings (using a patched jbackup.pl, from https://heinous.org/files/scripts/wordpress-lj/jbackup.pl.txt). The XML checks out as valid, and the 1.3 MB file contains several years’ worth of posts. Going through Manage/Import I can “Choose a file from your computer” and “Upload file and import”. I get the message: “Import LiveJournal
    All done. Have fun!”

    However, nothing has been imported; there are no new entries at all.

    I see several similar comments in the wiki about trouble importing Livejournal, but no clear resolutions.

    Any suggestions? Thanks.

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  • Thread Starter iayork

    (@iayork)

    OK, progress. The problem seems to be that the xml produced by the jbackup.pl tool (which is recommended in the wordpress instructions) doesn’t match the expectations of the import script. For example, jbackup produces entries starting like this:
    <entry jitemid=’1′ anum=’159′ ditemid=’415′>
    whereas the official LJ Export tool produces, and the Word Press import script expects, something like this:
    <entry>
    <itemid>114595</itemid>
    <eventtime>2007-04-02 11:56:00</eventtime>
    <logtime>2007-04-02 15:56:28</logtime>
    <subject>Time begins</subject>

    As well, the jbackup.pl time format isn’t recognized; it gives <date> and <systemdate> instead of <eventtime> and <logtime>.

    There may be other differences from expected tags, but those are definite problems.

    Having written a script to change those things to the expected format, the import seems to have worked reasonably well. Comments were not imported, even though they are present in the XML, but I don’t have a way to test what the import script wanted to see for comment tags (if anything).

    Hopefully not too many other people will waste their time with the jbackup.pl script.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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