Once upon a time, the preeminent community blogging platform was a website called LiveJournal. Many figures from the interactive fiction community used this platform, as well: here is the ifMUD account, for example, which was maintained between March of 2002 and December of 2007. Then, a Russian company bought the platform, and people began to abandon the website en masse. LiveJournal clones were popular; I had a friend who used DeadJournal, and a bunch of people I followed talked about the merits of a service called Dreamwidth. More significantly, Facebook and Twitter rose and fell. The sands of time piled up as decades passed.
When I woke up on this, the first morning of January of 2026, one of the first things I saw was a bluesky thread from the Dreamwidth owner about the potential future deactivation of non-Cyrillic LiveJournal accounts. Upon encountering this thread, I thought to myself: “hey, I used LiveJournal a bunch! And while a ton of those entries were pointless what-type-of-element-on-the-periodic-table-are-you personality quizzes and similar dreck, I would like to take the time to move the more substantial entries that seem worth preserving to my website when I have the opportunity. What if the website unexpectedly goes offline before I get the opportunity? I should have a backup.” Of the options discussed in that thread, the simplest seemed to be the Dreamwidth importer, and in the course of investigating that tool, I discovered that I had already created a Dreamwidth account in January of 2022. Moving the entries over from my old LJ account proved trivial, so I sought a greater challenge:
How do I preserve the entries from my spouse’s account?
The Dreamwidth importer is no good here, as Julie’s LJ password stopped working a long time ago, and the email address she signed up with was a university domain that she can no longer use. Attempts to contact LJ support went nowhere. Every import tool I’ve found on github requires LJ username and password as part of the download process. I found a browser extension designed to scrape livejournal data for use with AI which seems useless for this purpose and also gross and also expensive. One blogger describes a method of using AppleScript to automatically convert their entire LJ account via the Save as PDF function in Safari, which would be fantastic if I had access to a Mac device. I don’t know of a comparable method available in Windows. I suppose, if all else fails, I can just download each entry in sequence; she only has 1766. That could be worse.
So, long story short: if you have a LiveJournal account (or if there’s an account you liked to read that you don’t want to see disappear), you should take steps to preserve it while you have the opportunity. And if you have any recommendations for how we can make the process easier for ourselves, I’d love to hear them.