deslea

I have been on a quest this weekend to find a way to automate, or at least semi-automate, the process of saving memorified posts for offline viewing and backup purposes. ( Some background that won't matter to mostCollapse )

After a lot of different avenues of enquiry, I have now reached a workable solution using a few different Firefox extensions. It doesn't remove all the fiddling, but it cuts it to a manageable level, and makes me wish I'd done it before backing up my own. I suggest, if you're going to do this, you do it quickly, because a lot of your memories are probably disappearing as people delete their accounts.

Limitations:

1. Part of this method is to open all memories in a memory category, in new tabs. If you have many, many memories in a single category, this could crash your browser and/or computer. Test the method on a smaller category first, and if you're happy with how it works for you, invest some time separating them manually into smaller categories (ie, Funny Memes might become Funny Memes Part 1 and Part 2).

2. This method saves pages as MHT files, which are basically all-in-one webpage files readable by most browsers. However, embedded streaming content such as videos typically are not able to be saved.

3. I tested this on PC. It should work on Firefox for Mac and Linux as well, but there may be minor differences in how things behave.

Before you begin: You will need Firefox, and two Firefox add-ons, Greasemonkey and UnMHT. Install the add-ons and restart Firefox. Edit April 2018: The latest version of Firefox, Quantum, killed off a lot of add-ons, including unMHT. You can search for an alternative MHT saver plug-in, or downgrade Firefox temporarily (or permanently, as many have) to pre-Quantum.

Step 1: Make a One-Click Expand-All-LJ-Comments button on the bookmark toolbar ( Read more...Collapse )

Step 2: Add a Greasemonkey script to open all memories in a category as tabs ( Read more...Collapse )

Step 3: Load and prepare one of your LJ categories ( Read more...Collapse )

Step 4: Save your open tabs with UnMHT ( Read more...Collapse )

Step 5: Auto-close the tabs ( Read more...Collapse )

Step 6. Repeat Steps 3-4-5 for remaining categories.

Step 7. (Mandatory) Disable the LJMemoriesLinkOpen script. ( Read more...Collapse )

Step 8. (Optional) Delete your memories. ( Read more...Collapse )

Good luck, all, and many thanks to cschick and ruakh for helping me out along the way. This post will be made public, so you can link to it freely.

Many of you, like me, are moving to Dreamwidth and/or quitting LJ, but for various reasons, are not taking the "delete the whole account" approach. Here are some tips that may help you.

1. The LJ-SEC tool is a godsend. It's here - personally I like the Standalone Executable version so you don't have to install NET Framework. The things you can do with it include:

- It will delete your journal posts for you on a batch basis. You may need to run it more than once because LJ periodically kicks you off for an hour for excess queries.
- It will also add adult content markers on a batch basis - handy if you're staying and want to be Russian-law compliant.
- It will also change security on a batch basis.
- You can load a community you're a member of, right-click the post list and "Check My Entries Only", and delete/adult mark/change security on them all.

2. You may prefer, as I did, to tackle the community posts manually. (I didn't want to delete them, I just wanted to remove the fic and replace with a link to the fic on AO3). If so, go to http://communityname.livejournal.com/?poster=username (replacing communityname and username, of course) to find them.

3. If, like me, you set up your DW a while ago but didn't use it, you can re-import your LJ to Dreamwidth to bring over new entries and comments since the last time you imported, quite safely. However, I can't vouch for how this works if you've been actively using both (ie, you have matching entries at both with different comments at both). You may want to test this, or anyone who has done this, please comment about how it worked.

4. The main things that are not seamless when moving to DW, or manually deleting from LJ, are memories and photo hosting. Unfortunately, these are a manual thing. However, one thing that will make the memories easier is Multidelete, which adds checkboxes beside them so you can delete a lot of them. Go to your memories page, click on a category, and then add "&multidelete=1" to the end of that URL (not including the quote marks) and enter.

5. If you want a text-based backup of all your entries (not including comments) on your computer, you can get it from http://www.livejournal.com/export.bml - unfortunately, it has to be by month, and you only have XML and CSV format available. However, CSV is easily opened and manipulated in a spreadsheet program like Excel. I was fortunate enough to do this back when you could download a year at a time. A practical application is searching for text. I used this method to find all the posts that linked to LJ's photo hosting, so I could manually change their DW equivalent posts to use my current photo hosting.

6. There are other backup options via clients, which will also capture comments. I used to like LJ Archive, which worked a while back, but it hasn't been working this time around - I'm not sure if LJ is blocking it. Edit: I'm told there is a version of LJArchive that doesn't have the comment-importing bug at http://www.memory-prime.de/lja/LJa.html. If you're willing to spend a little money, the easiest and fastest solution is probably web-based BlogBooker, the commercial version of the old LJBook tool. You can get it as Word or PDF, and you can also do a limited section of your journal as a freebie to test it out.

7. Paid users at DW can search their journals. So, if there are specific things you want to find (such as my LJ photo hosting example above), you might like to invest in a little paid time at DW and search your journal after import.

I'm going to make this post public, so feel free to link to it and comment with further tips and tricks.