import from LiveJournal
-
Posts
-
is not working for my 2 blogs on LiveJournal with the error message:
Logging in to LiveJournal failed. Check your username and password and try again.
The user name and password are correct. After a few failed logins the message changes to tell that my IP is blocked by LJ for an hour.
The blog I need help with is catdanae.wordpress.com.
Hi there, That sounds like an issue you’ll want to contact LJ about.
Regardless, I’ve tagged this for Staff assistance in case there is an issue with the LJ importer.
Hi there,
You will need to contact LiveJournal regarding the blocked IP address issue.
Once that is resolved, please try importing again and make very sure that you input your username and password exactly as it appears in your LiveJournal account, including capitalization. Let me know if you need any more help with this.
No, the IP is blocked for an hour, it only means that the importer is indeed talking to LJ. The user name and password are correct.
LJ has undergone some changes. The importer needs to be updated. There could be a surge of people wanting to move from LJ.
Do you have any information on the changes at LiveJournal? They don’t notify other services when they change things, so we have no way of knowing this unless someone reports it. It will help to know exactly what has changed so we can update things on our end.
Sorry, not much, only hearsay of continuous user experience problems and myself sometimes when trying to post via Semagic I can’t login recently. Regarding the geographical move of their servers see here: http://dolboeb.livejournal.com/3078638.html which is not helping much technically but could explain why people would probably start moving in greater numbers as that jurisdiction has privacy issues.
Thanks for trying to help me(us). Maybe the php script or whatever is behind the Importer returns more detailed info on why it can’t login?
P.S. Semagic sometimes gives: Error 400 Server error. The plain HTTP request was sent to HTTPS port
The Semagic error you mention, is that when you try to connect to your LiveJournal site using the Semagic client?
1) Yesterday Semagic wouldn’t connect with the error:
Error 400. Server error. Please try again shortly.2) This morning it suddenly connected. I was happy and tried to export all the entries, Semagic has such a tool. But it gave me:
Error 400 Server error. The plain HTTP request was sent to HTTPS port3) Now again Semagic won’t login, so back to 1)
I guess LJ is broken or intentionally trying to stop scripts from logging in.
I did some digging on this, and it turns out LiveJournal’s API has been unstable for years. The API is what allows us to connect with their system, and is what makes the importer work. So if their API isn’t working, we have no way of establishing a connection with them. It looks like this is what’s going on here, especially given that you cannot connect via Semagic either.
There is another option, but is a bit more complicated. If you can set up a self-hosted WordPress site you might be able to import your posts using your JiveJournal site’s RSS feed. RSS imports aren’t possible on WordPress.com, but on a self-hosted site you can use a plugin to import your posts that way. Then you can create an export file on the self-hosted site, if you prefer having a WordPress.com site over a self-hosted one.
You can set up a self-hosted site for free using a provider like thisistap.com and then you should be able to do this. If you decide to just go with a self-hosted site instead, however, I’d recommend you rather look at a paid host like Bluehost or Pressable.
Thanks for a workaround. Unfortunately, the RSS feed for my LJ looks incomplete when I look at it in the web browser. Maybe I don’t understand how RSS works though. I might ask LJ to fix my RSS feed. Which RSS importer tool should I then be using to populate my new, hosted WordPress?
Another workaround for me could be to export (http://www.livejournal.com/export.bml) XML (or CSV) file, even if one month at a time. Do you have an importer that could work with their XML file?
If LJ has an XML export option you can definitely try that. Then you can try using the WordPress importer to import it, though I can’t guarantee that will work.
As for which RSS importer to use, you’ll need to ask in the self-hosted forums, as the users there will have more knowledge on this particular subject :)
https://wordpress.org/support/
I have asked our developers to also look into this, by the way, but they’ve only been able to confirm the problem is with the LJ API.
I’m having the same issue. Just want to do a one-time dump from LJ to WP and be done with LJ.
I’ve got an XML file of everything from LJ, but there’s no provision on WP to import an LJ-format XML file. Trying to do so as a WP file gives this error:
“This does not appear to be a WXR file, missing/invalid WXR version number
Try another file or contact support.”Same issue with LJ. These KGB clowns took my three thousands articles as hostages 8-)
638 kB
Can you please upload the file at this link:
https://www.dropbox.com/request/XRW0BTCY6544RUe1nUU6
If our developers can see how the file is structured, they might be able to adapt our existing importer, or find a way to edit the file so it will be valid. I cannot promise that we’ll be able to make this work, but we can try.
Done. Thanks for taking a look.
Thanks. I see the file is not structured at all like the export files you get from sites like WordPress or Blogger, which is why it doesn’t work. But I’ve asked a developer to take a look if there is anything that can be done.
It’s an accumulation of several months of LJ XML output, with the <LiveJournal> tags only at start and finish. When I was combining them in my local editor, I saw that tag only at start and end of each whole file, so figured that leaving that out of the middle would be a good plan.
But I’m just a caveman mechanical engineer… so if there’s something I need to do differently, please let me know.
The topic ‘import from LiveJournal’ is closed to new replies.
