Before continuing, update your subscriptions! You can find the link to the new Atom feed in the Basics section on the sidebar (don't know how to do RSS yet). And forget about the older site; it will no longer be updated (though the contents will remain there for a long time).
As you can see, the name of the blog has changed to The Julipedia. See this page for more information on its etimology and a bit of history.
How did I do the migration? It was not easy; I was able to automate several things, but ended up doing a lot by hand. Of course, I could have spent a lot of time writing and creating a script that did the whole migration, but it was not worth it. Here is a brief outline of what I had to do:
- I exported all the messages from the old site to XML documents using Livejournal's export utility. This tool works on a month basis, so I had to go month by month (easy).
- With the XML files at hand, I created a little XSLT stylesheet that extracted the subject and body parts of each post and converted them to a plain text file with extremely simple delimiters.
- Then I created a Perl script that took this plain text file and wrote a pair of files for each post: one holding the subject and one the body, doing some HTML fixes along the way.
- With all these little files at hand, I used Blogger's post-by-mail feature to automatically post all my messages (by using a little shell loop and mutt). I will talk about this on another post.
- Unfortunately, this did not preserve timestamps, so I manually fixed them all. Big ew: 181 posts to fix by hand.
- At last, I migrated all user comments, also by hand. At first, I thought there were very few of them, so it seemed like a painless task. But in the end, there were a lot (which is a good thing :-).
All my posts were migrated using my account. Posts made by other Livejournal users were migrated by using their user name and link to their blog. Posts made by other people were posted as anonymous.
I also added a little note on each post with the exact date in which it was originally posted, for archiving reasons.
