As with many others, I’ve taken the plunge to migrate my blog away from livejournal where it’s been hosted now for quite a while to a self-hosted wordpress install with what I think is a pretty appropriate domain name. I think that things should all be working at this point, but let me know if you have any problems in the usual places. Also, hopefully I won’t spam the Fedora planet too much in the process 🙂

And while I’m glad to have it done, it was nowhere near as simple as it could have been. There are a lot of resources out there for various pieces of the migration, but nothing which really handled all of it.

The first step was just exporting the posts — LiveJournal has a tool for doing this, but it only works a month at a time. Luckily, Leah had a script to automate that chunk. Of course, the import you then do to WordPress drops security settings. *sigh* So hacked the importer so that previously private entries remain that way. Patch will be sent to upstream wordpress soon.

The next step was comments. Here again, Leah had a script which got things started by backing up everything from lj but it then needed tweaking for the current wordpress for the comment import to be successful. Not too terrible, but I spent way longer than I should have looking for a more “integrated” solution.

The third step was migrating over tags. This was a little trickier as I wanted to end up with both tags and categories and not necessarily 1:1 mapping with what I had previously used for livejournal tags. A python script to iterate over the dump I had created, pull out things, do a few custom transforms and then post to the XML-RPC API of wordpress.

Thus, through an absolutely disgusting amount of PHP, Perl and Python thrown together, I have a pretty complete migration. I’m not sure it’s something I’d want to do again, though