How to back up your LiveJournal (DeadJournal, InsaneJournal, JournalFen...)
It's generally a good plan to keep a backup of your journal, whether or not you're planning to mirror the content somewhere else. It means that if you ever lose access to your LJ account you'll still have all your entries, and if the site ever goes out of business or bans you you'll still have a copy. Once you have the content stored on your hard disk, it also means that you can search through it easily.
There are a few good programs out there, but I wrote my own for other reasons I'll go into later. It's not very polished at present, but you can get hold of it here. As ever, this is offered without warranty and if the program or your journal break you get to keep both parts. It uses only very basic Perl and should be simple enough for anyone's computer to run.
The commands you want, under Unix, are:
(It's certainly possible to use this under Windows, but I have no idea how. If one of you lets me know I'll post it here and give you credit.) If you have characters other than letters and digits in your password, this may not work, because I cut corners to throw something together in a hurry. I'll fix things as people ask for them, so let me know what you need.
- wget http://marnanel.org/projects/blosxom/lj-backer-upper
- LJUSER=yourname LJPASS=yourpassword perl lj-backer-upper
There are no command-line switches at present, although there will be later. It will store every post you've ever made in a .txt file in the current directory. For this reason you should be sure to clear out the current directory of any .txt files before you start. If you would like to use a service other than LiveJournal, you can adjust a variable at the top of the file.