How to Move Posts from LiveJournal to WordPress

Looking for a way to copy your LiveJournal posts to a WordPress blog on your own domain?

If you’ve been blogging on LiveJournal for some time and you want to move to a new WordPress blog — but you don’t want to leave all your old posts behind — you can export your LiveJournal posts and import them into WordPress.

Using Export and Import allows you to move old posts one month at a time, and doesn’t require installing any new software.

Export LiveJournal Posts

To export LiveJournal posts, log into your account.

1. Go to LiveJournal’s Export Journal page at www.livejournal.com/export.bml.

2. Select the year and month you wish to export. You must enter four digits for the year and two digits for the month.

3. Select XML format. WordPress will not import the CSV format, so you must have LiveJournal export the posts in XML.

4. Check the items you want to appear in the LiveJournal export file. You should include one of the date options, the subject, the entry, and the security. Having the security (public, friends locked, or private) in the export file makes it easy to delete posts that shouldn’t be public.

Be careful about friends locked or private posts, because WordPress will display them. You will have to delete them from the XML file before importing it.

5. Click “Proceed.” The XML file with the exported LiveJournal posts is displayed in your browser. Save it to your computer with the extension .xml.

Edit the Exported LiveJournal Posts (optional)

If you have any friends locked or private posts, you should delete them from the XML file, or WordPress will import and display them.

1. Open the XML file in any text editor, like Notepad or TextEdit.

It will look something like this:

< ?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=’utf-8′? >

< livejournal >< entry >
< eventtime >2007-02-03 22:55:00< /eventtime >
< subject >Title of a public LJ post< /subject >
< event >A public LJ post is written here.< /event >
< security >public< /security >

< /entry >< entry >
< eventtime >2007-02-06 15:36:00< /eventtime >
< subject >Title of a filtered post< /subject >
< event >This is a friends locked post.< /event >
< security >usemask< /security >

< /entry >< /livejournal >

Each LiveJournal entry in the file starts with an < entry > tag and ends with an < /entry > tag. A post that includes “< security >usemask< /security >” is a friends locked post. Private posts are marked “< security >private< /security >”. If you don’t delete them from the file, WordPress will import and display them.

2. To delete any LiveJournal posts you don’t want to transfer to WordPress, just delete the < entry > and < /entry > tags and everything between them.

3. Save the XML file when you are done editing it.

Import the XML File into WordPress

1. Log into your WordPress blog. On the Dashboard, select “Manage,” and then select “Import.”

2. Click on “LiveJournal.”

3. Browse for the file you saved in Step 2. Click “Upload file and import.”

As soon as WordPress imports the posts, they are visible on your blog. You can edit or delete them under Manage Posts just like any other WordPress posts.

If you don’t want to import your LiveJournal posts into WordPress one month at a time, you can copy and paste all your XML files into one big file. WordPress will import files up to 7 MB in size.