Support means just that.

[azurelunatic]

So 13 people are known to have lost their jobs with the US-based branch of LiveJournal.com, with a week's notice and no severance package beyond accumulated time off. The Valley Wag has done its usual level of careful fact-checking (this is where the audience laughs knowingly) before publishing.

It sucks to lose a job. It sucks to lose a job in this economy.

LiveJournal has been more than just a job, from what I can tell. Speaking from my experience in Support, and my experience with LJ as a whole, it is many tight-knit groups of communities. We are protective of our own. Tonight the pieces of Support who are awake and feel like talking have gathered in IRC to discuss and just be there, be present, even though there is so little we can actually do.

We don't know what's going to happen next. We don't know what SUP will do with or to LJ. We can only speculate and worry and hope. But most of all we're here together because this is what we do. When the shit goes down, we come to each other.

Comments

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

Soooo. What are some good LJ backup tools for the Mac?

[lady-angelina.livejournal.com]

Ahhhh... I was wondering what your earlier post (from before I went to bed last night) was talking about. =/ Found out from several other people's posts this morning, as well. That bites hard. =(

[snakeling]

LJ Migrate.
Backs up posts, comments and usericons, and migrates posts to the LJ clone of your choice.

Easy to use, especially for *nix users (which includes Mac OS X). Slightly more painful for Windows users, as they're not really used to command line and need to install Python.

[azurelunatic]

No clue, alas.

[kseniia.livejournal.com]

Q: Where did you get your numbers? Just curious.

Windows Client for LJ Archiving

[strife-caecus.livejournal.com]

Those looking for a Windows-based client for LJ can use ljArchive found here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ljarchive/

[azurelunatic]

Gossip from closer to the source than the Valley Wag. (I don't want to get anyone in trouble, so there's less detail in this post than there was.)

Re: Windows Client for LJ Archiving

[azurelunatic]

That's the one I'm using. I figured that no matter what, it's good to have a backup.

[kseniia.livejournal.com]

*Nods* I get it. Do you know if LJ and/or SUP will speak out about the cuts?

[azurelunatic]

They will probably have to, but I have no idea when or what they're going to say other than this brief statement: http://twitter.com/LiveJournal/status/1099760975

[edit: their link is to their corporate news, which has no news any more recent than mid-December at this point in time.]

[livinglaurel.livejournal.com]

Wow, that really, really, really fucking sucks.

[azurelunatic]

Now there's a press release: http://livejournalinc.com/press_releases/20090106.php

[cz_unit]

There you are. LTNS.

I think what bothers me about this is it's a reminder yet again that the Internet is ephemeral. I remember 20 years ago working on the first TinyMUD; it went away one weekend without a trace; that was a year's worth of my creativity lost in an instant.

Taught me a lesson though: When you outsource things you lose some control. And in a way LJ is an out-sourcing of my friend-contact-keep in touch thing. And my diary for the past 6 years. I should have a backup if needed.

Life's little lessons.
Chris

[stagemanager.livejournal.com]

The cynical part of me notices the timing of the Permanent Account sale and this announcement. Coincidence? I think not.

Although, realistically, it could be that the PA sale was a way to try to raise cash to fend off any type of layoffs; if so, it didn't work.

[azurelunatic]

Brad's commentary back in the day indicated that permanent accounts were for quick cash.

And I heard also that people had time over the holidays off above and beyond the holidays themselves, and I'm not sure whether that other time was paid or not (I am speculating possibly not).

[write-light.livejournal.com]

This program will back up, but not migrate, comments, just FYI.

[write-light.livejournal.com]

Isn't this just because they just moved the servers out of San Francisco?

[azurelunatic]

I don't know what part that played in it. When the servers were in SF, they were still in the same data center they were with 6A, with some 6A machinery still involved in all of it, with 6A employees involved in the day-to-day operation of the servers.

Now that the servers are in Montana, there will still need to be someone taking care of the servers.

[azurelunatic]

As my journal's subtitle says, LJ is nearly a prosthetic memory to me.

Re: Windows Client for LJ Archiving

[snobahr.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to find another client, since ljArchive keeps saying I need to convert older entries, but I haven't the foggiest clue how - it tells me to change a setting in "edit personal information," but bugger-all if I can find where that is... (found your entry via hakeber)

Re: Windows Client for LJ Archiving

[azurelunatic]

This should start you on the right path, assuming it's a character in an older entry or something causing a problem: http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=143

Re: Windows Client for LJ Archiving

[snobahr.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I have to wait about an hour, due to multiple attempts to get some manner of archive going (4547 entries! YIKES!), but thank you very much for that link :)

Re: Windows Client for LJ Archiving

[azurelunatic]

I see your 4547 and raise you 28,000-odd. I, too, am waiting for an hour.

But still...

[snobahr.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

:)

Re: But still...

[azurelunatic]

You're welcome.

I don't see myself going anywhere else any time soon, and since LJ is the Serious Blog of Choice in Russia, I don't see SUP ditching LJ any time soon either, but it's good to have backups.

[snakeling]

Yes, that's what I said :)

Re: Windows Client for LJ Archiving

[doingsoso.livejournal.com]

LJArchive works just fine:)

Go to this post and it tells you about the encoding and what to do:

http://sageness.livejournal.com/1174102.html

[write-light.livejournal.com]

Quite so. Just clarifying. :blush:

[7rin.livejournal.com]

So glad it's not just me. :s

Why is it at the first sign of trouble I run over to see what you've said? Oh, I know, 'cause you're awesome at being reasonable - at least in public at any rate.

I haven't done IRC in forever (and never on any of the LJ stuff), but pass on my best to those that've been ditched, please.

[azurelunatic]

I can be as unreasonable as I want to in private. :D That, and I got most of my incoherent swearing done on Twitter and in IRC.

I passed along your best wishes.

[elf]

Which is why the Organization for Transformative Works decided to build a fanfic archive site where fans owned the servers, and a nonprofit org to run it, so it couldn't vanish in a fit of pique or ex-boyfriend with a root login and a grudge.

(And it grew into a wiki and an academic journal and other stuff. But the original idea was, "hey, let's put our writing somewhere that won't vanish because the marketing guys got stupid for a few months, or because some paralegal is horribly offended by Harry Potter porn.")

[wibbble]

The odd thing is that while LJ has been hugely important to my life (I met my wife here!), I would never sign up for a service like this now. I want all my stuff under my control.

I only use Twitter because it's convenient - if I really wanted to I could replicate the basic Twitter microblogging functionality myself...

[wibbble]

My mother asked what Twitter was. I said 'I mainly use Twitter for swearing'.

[azurelunatic]

It is indeed a great place to swear.

[talentshow.livejournal.com]

I love the idea of LJ Migrate, but damned if I can get it to run with OS X. I've been futzing with it most of the morning.

[azurelunatic]

And I think about it a little more over in suggestions: http://community.livejournal.com/suggestions/905442.html?thread=14280930#t14280930

[snakeling]

There's an illustrated tutorial for Mac users in the post; have you looked at it? I couldn't help you myself, as I've spent all of five minutes on a Mac, ever, and I hated every second of it :D

[ron_newman]

It won't back up comments in a community, not even a community where I'm a maintainer. (I tried it last night on davis_square.)

[ron_newman]

What sort of trouble are you having with it?

[pne.livejournal.com]

That's a limitation of LiveJournal's API, I think - it gives you access to entries for communities that you have posting access to (you need not even be maintainer; I had a script once that checked entries from a community and alerted me if one of a list of "interesting" users posted a new entry - this was before subscriptions), but comments only for your own journal.

[afuna]

ljmigrate uses export_comments.bml, which can take an &authas=communityname to download the comments from a community you maintain. But ljmigrate doesn't append the &authas=

That is,
http://www.livejournal.com/export_comments.bml?get=comment_meta

just gets you your own journal's comments.

http://www.livejournal.com/export_comments.bml?get=comment_meta&authas=communityname

gets you that community's comments.

[pne.livejournal.com]

D'oh! I should've checked the docs before making that statement.

Thanks for the clarification. So it should be able to get ljmigrate to work with community comments by fiddling with the URL-producing code yourself. (Or notifying the maintainer and hoping for an updated version.)

[afuna]

To be fair, syncitems (in the API) doesn't allow you to sync community comments, I think, and export_comments.bml isn't *exactly* part of the API, either.

So it should be able to get ljmigrate to work with community comments by fiddling with the URL-producing code yourself. (Or notifying the maintainer and hoping for an updated version.)

Yup!

[ron_newman]

Does syncitems allow you to sync personal journal comments? I didn't think it dealt with any comments at all.

[antennapedia.livejournal.com]

Cool. I'm on it. I never got around to reading the source for export_comments to figure out how it does what it does, which I really should have done at some point.

[afuna]

Ah! This outdated manual says that it should but the more updated reference says that it's not supported.

[afuna]

I'm on it.
Awesome.

By the way, count me as a huge fan of your script! I love how much it does, and how simple it makes it to back things up.