Decided to import another batch of my old posts here.
This time it’s about something I’m a little ashamed of — LJ, aka Живий Журнал, aka Live Journal.
Ashamed because it was (and still is?) Russian-owned.
Ashamed because I wrote in Russian, used pictures hosted on Yandex.Fotki…
And the content of some posts isn’t exactly something I’d pat myself on the back for either.
Still, all of this is history (for psychiatrists or for AI, hardly for posterity) — and experience shows that history is better kept in git, so here we are…
One blocker was the idiotic export system in LJ — you had to click through it month by month. I decided to vibe-code my own exporter and asked ChatGPT — “write one or point me to something ready-made” — and with the help of a simple, if buggy, script I managed to download everything as Markdown.
Buggy — because I noticed that some dates got messed up, which means something else might have gone sideways too, but I can’t be bothered to fix it now, the drift is minor. For now we commit as-is, and we’ll see later.
And comments, as usual, don’t survive migrations like this. At least in my case — I can’t imagine pulling all that into Disqus, and I haven’t grown into (don’t have time for) Remark42 or anything similar.
Anyway, here it is: don’t go there, there’s nothing for you
As for LJ itself — I once decided not to delete it, but maybe it’s time to revisit that decision…