When many other LJ archiving tools went proprietary or were shut down by rate limiting, this tool stood the test of time and still works to this day as far as I know. It's been less than a year since I've used it, I think.
Since using this tool from my youth and learning to program a bit, I've come to address a few of its problems... At least the ones that I had.
Shitty XML files -- not the author's fault. XML files are innately trash. :P. Unreliable encoding. Reliance on Wordpress to fix it. I say this with the greatest respect. This tool is efficient and merely need something like this template builder.
You can transform xml to html with a simple template like posttemp.html. See the screencaps directory.
In that template file, you can see that I'm using some bootstrap classes in my post. But they're not important. $TIME, $DATE, $POST -- these are the placeholders that insert the data from the xml.
I hate to say it but for all the xml data has on it, those were the only things I found worth salvaging.
When its finished outputting every html template (to be again, templated into a CSS design or something) it will dump the entire journal as a single json file as well, which is so much better for me at least...
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(BTW if you are looking for support trying to use this tool and are not having luck contacting the original programmer, let me know. My python2 is not the best but I can probably figure it out. I deleted my LJs a while back when the Russian Oh No They Didn't invasion was complete. )
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This program reads the journal entries from a livejournal (or compatible) blog site and archives them in a subdirectory named after the journal name.
The simplest way to run this is to execute the ljdump.py script with Python. Depending on your OS, you may be able to double-click the ljdump.py script directly, or you may need to open a Terminal/Command Prompt window to run it. Either way, it will prompt you for your Livejournal username and password, then download all your journal entries, comments, and userpics.
You may optionally download entries from a different journal (a community) where you are a member. If you are a community maintainer, you can also download comments from the community.
If you want to save your username and password so you don't have to type it every time you run ljdump, you can save it in the configuration file.
The configuration is read from "ljdump.config". A sample configuration is provided in "ljdump.config.sample", which should be copied and then edited. The configuration settings are:
server - The XMLRPC server URL. This should only need to be changed if you are dumping a journal that is livejournal-compatible but is not livejournal itself.
username - The livejournal user name. A subdirectory will be created with this same name to store the journal entries.
password - The account password. This password is never sent in the clear; the livejournal "challenge" password mechanism is used.
journal - Optional: The journal to download entries from. If this is not specified, the "username" journal is downloaded. If this is specified, then only the named journals will be downloaded (this element may be specified more than once to download multiple journals).
This program may be run as often as needed to bring the backup copy up to date. Both new and updated items are downloaded.
The community http://ljdump.livejournal.com has been set up for questions or comments.
convertdump - convert ljdump format to wordpress importer format Contributed by Sean M. Graham (www.sean-graham.com) and others
This will convert a pydump archive into something compatible with the WordPress LiveJournal importer. This is the same format used by the Windows ljArchive exporter.
Arguments: -u --user username of archive to process [required] -l --limit limit the number of entries in each xml file (default 250) -i --insecure include private and protected entries in the output -h --help show this help page
Example: ./convertdump.py --user stevemartin --limit 200 --insecure