Rebuilding a blog from fragments

It’s actually happening. If you go to my site there are now posts for 2011-2016. And that has been due to some really wonderful plugins for WordPress as well as other applications so here are the ones I used:

Get your files, get them as csv. No, just do it. Because there is only one unflappable plugin.

Blog plugins

Really Simple CSV Importer

This is access from your dashboard under Tools, Import as CSV. You will only be able to upload a file, not do any editing of it so you need to make sure your csv files have the right coumn names. I will deal with that later, but for now just get this plugin in place. THIS IS MAGIC!

LiveJournal Crossposter

This works to post from a WP self hosted blog to LJ, and you can post full posts. I recommend this as this is how I rescued so many posts that were lost here but saved there! Set this to not crosspost while you import though. Trust me. LJ support is great but if you flood their servers with multiple posts (if your importer doesn’t recognise post dates!) they will cut you off. And that is as good thing. But difficult.

 

Off site exporters

Livejournal

The plugin is accessed from the normal Dashboard “settings” drop down, and you can turn off crosspost by default while importing posts to your WP!

LiveJournal Export feature

Export as csv! the XML files can go askew very easily but csv has been totally predictable so far. Yes, it will be month by month, but if you have private or friend’s only posts you want to find them easily. So month by month.

 

Tumblr

Tumblr2WordPress: Export Your Tumblr to WordPress

Don’t be fooled, this will export as an xml file. I have pared back my posts here to my own content at I still had 1600 posts as of typing.

Tumblr Importer

This works, but if you want to do any editing of content like only bringing in posts from certain dates, you are not really in luck for easy XML visual editors. Once installed it too is found in

 

File conversion!

 

XMLFox

OMG! So much love! It took my stupid huge XMl file and has made it in to a very easy to manage CVS file. I spent a day trying to run JSON scripts on tumblr to try and get some smaller files but this was just perfect. Download XMLFox Advance is the one you want. Easy to open a file then convert. It may take a while if your file is large.

 

File editing

So the CSV files will open up in a spread sheet, finding a program that will do that well? It took me time to find one.

Google Docs

I was unable to get Open Office or FreeOffice to open these correctly, OO and Excel are recommended but I simply found my cells out of order. So I think I may have found the suggestion online, but csv can be readd as a spreadsheet so.. google drive?

https://drive.google.com/drive/my-drive

If you put your files in here you will then be able to use the online tools to access them. I really recommend editing, downloading, and removing files asap.

So once you have your csv files in here right click your files and choose “open with” Google Sheets.

You will find livejournal much easier to manipulate than tumblr as they were far fewer names and value options.

Livejournal editing

ljcsvoriginal

So nice and clean, but the converter will not recognise any of it.

So just rename the top row of cells to match columns:

post_id = itemid
post_date = eventtime OR logtime
post_content = event
post_title = subject
post_status = security (you must change public to publish- use find/replace in edit selecting only that column)

That was as much as I could get from my lj csv files, but it is enough. The importer will fill in categories (uncategorised), author (default user) and other vital elements.

I did remove rows if I had any protected entries, and I did remove the entire column logtime.

ljcsvupdated

And then download as “comma separated values”.

Use the installer at the very top of this page. If your content was built from visual editors they may be messy. I have some width weirdness going on. But nothing I cannot fix in the WP editor. Some posts only show the time not the date, but they are in the correct position. So this means my blog posts in searches will now at least have some content.

Tumblr editing

Urgggghhh I need to face this but the principles are the same. Remove rows for any protected entries, remove columns for unneeded fields.

tumblrorig1

Okay..

tumblrorig2

Where are my entries?

tumblrorig3

Ahh.. rght. So this is a lot more work but will be worth it as many of those are from instagram which is super difficult to get into a self hosted site.

 

 

 

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