DID THIS REALLY HAPPEN??

[matt1993]

YES!!!!

I'm FINALLY up to 944 entries fixed!!!!!


Yeah, that doesn't sound like a major milestone, but when you consider that entries 929-935 and 937-944 are all really long entries with lots of links to previous entries and comments by me - some of which were very cringeworthy or in upsetting threads - and so I had to skim through ALL of those entries again to change the LJ links to their DW counterparts when possible/necessary and decide what tags needed to be added... getting through all that IS a pretty significant milestone!! :D


How long have I been working on fixing just that set of entries?

*reads through my entries from this year until I figure out when that was*

September 4. In over two months, I only fixed sixteen entries...


At least hopefully from now on I'll start getting to feel like I'm making progress and it's not completely hopeless! :D

Comments

[matrixmann]

I remember the last time I had to fix music links over at my place because YouTube deleted some stuff again... Think, it was more than 10 links, and I was already served as doing the evaluation (seeing how much it was).
Well, that stuff that already went crossposted from here is easy to do, so there's no need to do that twice, but still. The search part takes quite an amount of time for this.

[matt1993]

For me I feel so far behind because I joined DW in May 2017 and cross-posted my entries from LJ (which I still use, and still prefer over DW), so cross-posting saved me a bit of trouble, but not much because:

- For consistency, I wanted links to LJ/DW entries to be the LJ versions on LJ and the DW versions on DW (unless it's a link to a journal that's only on one or the other), so those who prefer to use DW only can see my entries the way they were intended while staying on DW.
- If music tags are too long on LJ, they got cut off at the end on DW
- NONE of my entries on DW ended up having tags on them. I had to add them ALL manually
- Even before I had to create a DW due to some of my LJ friends moving there permanently or almost permanently, I felt so far behind because there were broken links and broken images I needed to fix in my entries since January 2015, at the latest.
- And I had 1100-1200 entries or so when I joined DW. Now I'm up to 1339, including this one.
- That's WITHOUT counting my very cluttered profile and my community entries that I'll also need to fix.

Yeah, it's no surprise these past couple of years have been stressful for me. And every time a site/YouTube channel/etc. I like (especially one I wasn't caught up on reading/watching) goes down, that just makes it worse. :(

[matrixmann]

I think I didn't have many interlinked entries for which I have to adapt the links to the corresponding entries in each journal, but when I have to do it, sometimes ljArchive is a help, if those entries aren't date-bound. When looking for something content-specific, it helps to scan through with search terms to find out which entry it was in and then one just has to pick out the entry on both platforms by the date it's been posted. At least that's the same on both of them.

Sounds like the import itself went a bit chaotic, technically, right?
Well, in my import, I didn't have too much frippery to process (many thanks to the heavenly powers that don't exist!), so I didn't have that much trouble with it.
Although meanwhile, I've noticed, it isn't always perfect - when trying to import comments from LJ to here once in a while, I've also had it that the import had that clearly selected in the options, it also told me that they were imported, but the new ones clearly weren't there on the counter.
I don't know if that might have happened to you...
Frustrating it is in any way, if you have to go through a thousand entries just to apply them back manually...

Community entries I can't say anything about, as I've had to import nothing like that and I'm also not a member of any which did.
Only thing I noticed is: You can import entries from an LJ community to here, but there's no crosspost option for posting an DW community entry over to LJ. Communities this isn't available with in general.

[matt1993]

EDIT: This ended up being longer than I thought since I tried to respond to everything you brought up. Sorry!

sometimes ljArchive is a help, if those entries aren't date-bound.

This might've helped if I'd known about it before I did the automatic import and then spent over a year manually fixing all things I'd been meaning to fix in my entries (LJ and DW, caused by the import or otherwise)... but now I've gotten so far manually that I feel it'd be safer to continue to do it the way I was doing it rather than try any automated alternative. But thanks anyway. :)

Question: what do you mean by date-bound? Like, I have one backdated entry (posted in May 2016 but listed as January 2015), one sticky entry on both LJ and DW, and one entry that was listed as 2024 for a long time (so also a "sticky entry" in a way) until I moved it to the date it was actually posted to prepare for adding a replacement for it... which, if any, of these are what you mean by date-bound?

Sounds like the import itself went a bit chaotic, technically, right?

Sort of, but I think that's only due to the limitations DW has compared to LJ.
The music tags got cut off at the end because LJ increased the character limit for that at some point a few years ago and DW did not follow suit.
Writer's Block questions didn't show up on DW because DW has no access to the LJ Writer's Block questions and whatnot, forcing me to approximate the functionality by copy the question and adding "Answer" and "View Answers" links that go where they would on LJ for each DW entry with a Writer's Block question.
Repost buttons don't show up on DW because... I don't know, actually, because I could've sworn I saw a repost button in a DW entry at least once. Since I don't know how to make repost buttons on DW, I settled for replacing them with the closest thing I know how to make: text links that read whatever the repost button's caption was originally and lead to https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/tellafriend?journal=matt1993&itemid=<whatever the entry's ID number is>.
My 4770 tags were all imported to DW - the tags themselves were, that is - but somehow it lost track of which tags went on each entry during the import; I figured maybe it normally works fine and it just had a hiccup for me, but since DW's tag limit is normally only 2000 I figured it was more likely because of that.
Do videos usually import correctly from LJ to DW? None of them did in my case. Apparently the video embed-ids ended up being different on DW from what they were on LJ, resulting in DW video embeds that aren't fixed yet either not showing up at all or showing up as some other random video from an entry I posted or edited after the import.
URLs of links and images were all initially exactly the same in my DW entries as my LJ entries... which meant some of my DW entries have links to LJ entries even when those LJ entries have counterparts on DW. Same thing with images in my ScrapBook. I didn't want that; I wanted my entries to be future-proofed in case my LJ (or LJ as a whole) went down. Which, yes, I don't feel is very likely now since my LJ is still here over a year later, but in 2017 I didn't really know what was going on and was scared and thought it was a possibility. And I know how much I'd panic if it were to happen after all.

Although meanwhile, I've noticed, it isn't always perfect - when trying to import comments from LJ to here once in a while, I've also had it that the import had that clearly selected in the options, it also told me that they were imported, but the new ones clearly weren't there on the counter.
I don't know if that might have happened to you...

I've only done the "import comments" thing once, as part of the import of everything from my LJ when I joined DW. I've never tried to import any one thing separately, and I'd prefer not to so that I can be sure it all ends up the way I want, or at least as close as possible. Before I knew much about DW (but after I knew I'd probably have to join it), I was even fully prepared for the possibility that DW might have no auto-import feature at all and I'd have to spend years copying all the entries and comments one by one or something. Then when I found out it (thankfully) did have an auto-import feature, I decided to use that once, to speed up the process by turning "I might have to copy them all manually" into "I'm gonna have to edit usually-minor things in all of them manually". I have no plans to use the auto-import again anytime soon because I'm afraid it might end up deleting or duplicating my entries or causing anything else weird to happen that'll take forever to fix.

Yes, I'm a bit OCD... I didn't like the idea of there being any major differences between the LJ and DW versions of any of my entries or the pre-import-to-DW comments on them.

Frustrating it is in any way, if you have to go through a thousand entries just to apply them back manually...

I know, right? And more so if there were already broken images and stuff in some of those LJ entries long before I knew I'd ever join DW...

Community entries I can't say anything about, as I've had to import nothing like that and I'm also not a member of any which did.

Sorry if I was confusing - I brought up the subject of communities because I wanted to fix broken links/images/etc. in my community entries on LJ. In most cases I don't plan to import them to DW, just fix what's broken in them.

I only own one community on LJ, of which I'm one of the only two members of, and have no plans to import it to DW. (I have plans to fix broken links and such like in my own journal, yes, but not import it.)

I am a member of a few other LJ communities, one of which was deleted last year (since the moderators decided it had become inactive). So far my entries in that community (ONLY my own entries) are the only community entries I want to "import" to DW - I plan on at some point manually recreating (with the help of my email notifications and/or archive.org) all of my own entries (or what's left of them) from that community in my own journal (both the LJ and DW version), because those entries are still my entries and I still want to keep them. (I'd make formerly members-only entries either friends-only or private)

I didn't post many entries in that community, so it might not take too long, but I would then have to update links that used to point to my entries in the original community to instead point to my new archived copies...


Am I making sense?

[matrixmann]

Date-bound entries (like the yearly mentioning of an anniversary) for linking to them are quite easy to find in both journals, as they run with the same date on them.
But, when looking for a specific entry which I talked about or mentioned a certain topic in, when I'm looking for a specific content (so to say), often I don't remember when I posted it.
So then I head off to using ljArchive because it allows you to search your offline archived journal via keywords. Mostly then I find what I was looking for - and can find the specific entry in both online journals, again, by their respective date they were posted on (as that's the same on both) to use their individual links...

It's a sort of manual method, I don't think there's anything better out there - at least it works proper for me.

Certain technical things don't carry over properly by their design, I noticed that too.
Video embeds, for example, don't carry over - but, as I see it, that may be due to the nature the iframe tag works like. When replacing an embed, I've got to do the embed completely new on LJ too. (Think it might be the ID placed at the very beginning of the code is the decisive issue.)

The tags problem - this might have something too do with the individual limitations of the website. I have a bit more than 100 tags, that's within the limits of both sites, and I didn't have a problem with that during the import. (Only it reimports hashtag-generated tags every time to here, but that's surely due to LJ turning things with a hashtag-symbol automatically into a regular tag that also appears at the bottom of the entry among the other tags, but without counting it as such on the tag counter. So it surely gets regarded as a normal tag by the DW importer.)
I think, LJ was also limited to 1000 tags for free accounts until a few years ago, wasn't it? They raised that meanwhile to 2000.

Character limitation for tags, I can't recall how that was kept on LJ. Over here, I see the note about the limit on the new "post an entry"-site with its 40 characters every time. And I only reached that limit once with a community tag here to see the behavior of DW in that situation (It cuts it down to the 40 symbols too.).
So, might be that DW does the cut down automatically in order to keep your tag in the data banks at all...

Writer's block doesn't carry over too. Mostly the window which the question appears in seems to be the problem. Such a feature or module doesn't exist here until today.
I had one entry where I had to replace that - damn, what did I do that with?
I think I found some html which allows you to insert a text field, so that the question can be read again normally. That was the best I could find - my main concern in the first place was to be able to read the question again in order to understand the answer written below.
Over here's some community meanwhile doing a similar thing to writer's block, it's called "questionoftheday" (I see you subscribed to it too), and they also do their own kind of thing in terms of embed code in order to make this functional.
So it seems like there's no proper solution for that for here until now...

Normal links are carried over here as they were on LJ because it's just a simple import feature. Data carrying over to another data bank. This needs to be replaced manually to the corresponding entries on the other journal as the importer simply doesn't know which corresponding entries in the DW journal they belong too.
Annoying, but this is so.
For links going out to sites of third parties, this fortunately doesn't apply as the source they link to doesn't change and html tags for linking to another side are the same everywhere all over the web.

Another thing I noticed which carries over pretty well is when you got this headline at the top of an entry that it's a reposted entry. You know, when it says "Originally posted by" user X and the title of the original entry (with a link to it on LJ). (An example from my site: https://matrixmann.dreamwidth.org/196651.html
This carries over like it is made on LJ without problems.
Actually, the source code that appears over here is pretty nice as it also builds in a "user site=dreamwidth.org user=matrixmann" tag in the headline (html <> quotation marks both deleted now to show the text), so that it potentially works properly over here - I think I only needed to exchange the website from LJ to dreamwidth, if your username's different here, then you'll put that in, and just change the URL of the entry it points to (if points to something from your own journal) and there you go.
When crossposting such a head in an entry, LJ somehow transmits this into another code too, which appears workable to me, I only change that back on LJ separately to the simpler version LJ would do itself (if I used LJs own repost button) for the sake of clarity.
So to say, technically they have no repost-button over here like LJ, but the head that LJ adds to entries if you use it over there, that one's very much transferable.
I don't remember - it might even be that LJs

[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<lj|user="x">') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

Date-bound entries (like the yearly mentioning of an anniversary) for linking to them are quite easy to find in both journals, as they run with the same date on them.
But, when looking for a specific entry which I talked about or mentioned a certain topic in, when I'm looking for a specific content (so to say), often I don't remember when I posted it.
So then I head off to using ljArchive because it allows you to search your offline archived journal via keywords. Mostly then I find what I was looking for - and can find the specific entry in both online journals, again, by their respective date they were posted on (as that's the same on both) to use their individual links...

It's a sort of manual method, I don't think there's anything better out there - at least it works proper for me.

Certain technical things don't carry over properly by their design, I noticed that too.
Video embeds, for example, don't carry over - but, as I see it, that may be due to the nature the iframe tag works like. When replacing an embed, I've got to do the embed completely new on LJ too. (Think it might be the ID placed at the very beginning of the code is the decisive issue.)

The tags problem - this might have something too do with the individual limitations of the website. I have a bit more than 100 tags, that's within the limits of both sites, and I didn't have a problem with that during the import. (Only it reimports hashtag-generated tags every time to here, but that's surely due to LJ turning things with a hashtag-symbol automatically into a regular tag that also appears at the bottom of the entry among the other tags, but without counting it as such on the tag counter. So it surely gets regarded as a normal tag by the DW importer.)
I think, LJ was also limited to 1000 tags for free accounts until a few years ago, wasn't it? They raised that meanwhile to 2000.

Character limitation for tags, I can't recall how that was kept on LJ. Over here, I see the note about the limit on the new "post an entry"-site with its 40 characters every time. And I only reached that limit once with a community tag here to see the behavior of DW in that situation (It cuts it down to the 40 symbols too.).
So, might be that DW does the cut down automatically in order to keep your tag in the data banks at all...

Writer's block doesn't carry over too. Mostly the window which the question appears in seems to be the problem. Such a feature or module doesn't exist here until today.
I had one entry where I had to replace that - damn, what did I do that with?
I think I found some html which allows you to insert a text field, so that the question can be read again normally. That was the best I could find - my main concern in the first place was to be able to read the question again in order to understand the answer written below.
Over here's some community meanwhile doing a similar thing to writer's block, it's called "questionoftheday" (I see you subscribed to it too), and they also do their own kind of thing in terms of embed code in order to make this functional.
So it seems like there's no proper solution for that for here until now...

Normal links are carried over here as they were on LJ because it's just a simple import feature. Data carrying over to another data bank. This needs to be replaced manually to the corresponding entries on the other journal as the importer simply doesn't know which corresponding entries in the DW journal they belong too.
Annoying, but this is so.
For links going out to sites of third parties, this fortunately doesn't apply as the source they link to doesn't change and html tags for linking to another side are the same everywhere all over the web.

Another thing I noticed which carries over pretty well is when you got this headline at the top of an entry that it's a reposted entry. You know, when it says "Originally posted by" user X and the title of the original entry (with a link to it on LJ). (An example from my site: <a href="https://matrixmann.dreamwidth.org/196651.html" target="_blank">https://matrixmann.dreamwidth.org/196651.html</a>
This carries over like it is made on LJ without problems.
Actually, the source code that appears over here is pretty nice as it also builds in a "user site=dreamwidth.org user=matrixmann" tag in the headline (html <> quotation marks both deleted now to show the text), so that it potentially works properly over here - I think I only needed to exchange the website from LJ to dreamwidth, if your username's different here, then you'll put that in, and just change the URL of the entry it points to (if points to something from your own journal) and there you go.
When crossposting such a head in an entry, LJ somehow transmits this into another code too, which appears workable to me, I only change that back on LJ separately to the simpler version LJ would do itself (if I used LJs own repost button) for the sake of clarity.
So to say, technically they have no repost-button over here like LJ, but the head that LJ adds to entries if you use it over there, that one's very much transferable.
I don't remember - it might even be that LJs <lj|user="X" /> tag in this repost head also works over here with a DW name (edit: I see, it does! Just had to put in an | between lj and user to keep it visible!), but I keep that other head-tag with the declaration of site-name in my respost entries for the sake of "it works a 100%".
So, whenever I need this repost head at the beginning of an entry, I just copy&paste it from another DW entry it's in and change the parts that need to be changed.

In your case it might be justified to be a bit paranoid about "does it all carry over my stuff correctly?" as there seem to be a bit non-standard things in your journal.
Wasn't the case for mine, so that worked pretty well, not counting that things which the importer technically can't adjust automatically or which seem to be conflicting in general. (For example, I don't deal much with graphics and images. This sort of stuff just makes the computer work a lot, you'll have to store it anywhere - while image uploading services also change their TOS every few years so that you have to go look for a new service for that. And what people or content to link to is often a question of conscience for me - I don't find much which I really like or enjoy or find good as an opinion. I'm very careful with what I solidarize.
So that makes not much technically extravagant stuff that had to be carried over.)

Yes, I know what you mean for the community entries.
(*sigh*) All of this interlinking stuff takes a lot of time if you have to reconstruct it and even recreate the contents that were pointed to...
I dislike it every time I have to do such stuff myself, as it always takes more amounts of time searching or finding the links which you just have to do a simple copy&paste with for the URL to put it back in somewhere. The putting in itself takes no more than a minute, but receiving the name of the URL always takes at least 5 minutes...
If you have to do that in a larger amount, it takes hours about which you feel later like you wasted a whole evening for nothing.
Simply annoying...