LJ Engineers Laid Off

See here and here. Some rather large percentage of the technical people at LJ have been laid off. Ops is reportedly still around, so maybe database problems and so on will still get fixed, but you gotta be concerned.

Update: LJ press release. They're moving the programming to Russia, which makes sense. So don't be too concerned, but back up your LJ anyway, cause it's good practice. (Then forget to do it for another year, like I do.)

For the more technical, ljdump looks good. ljsm also works well. The difference: ljdump produces a real backup, that could be processed and reasonably easily uploaded to a new blog. (Reasonably easy for me, but I'm a geek.) ljsm produces a mirror of your livejournal that you could stick up on a Web site somewhere.

I think I'd recommend using them both. Caveat: ljsm may not work on your Mac if you aren't running Leopard. (For geeks: it needs the LWP libraries, which weren't always shipped with the OS.)

Community maintainers: ljsm looks like it'll work better for archiving your community. I have not tested this yet.

Big important note: you will be backing up your locked entries along with everything else. So if you republish it without checking those, you will republish your locked entries, and they will probably not be locked.

ljArchive may be good for Windows; I haven't tested it. See this post if you want to give it a try. I can't find anything that's simple, Mac-oriented, and that backs up comments, but here are some HOWTOs for the other programs if you're on a Mac. Both have been tested and seem to work for most people.

LJBook allows you to turn your journal plus comments into a PDF. Their site was not ready for a bazillion worried LJ readers to come over and use it, alas, and they are down as of this writing.

LJMigrate is another command line tool. That page provides novice instructions. I haven't tested it at all but I've seen recommendations for it.

jbackup.pl is another perl backup script; I haven't tested it.

LJ has a built in export feature, which does not export comments or icons or anything.

( Mac HOWTOs and caveats follow )

It All Happens So Quick

Updated my post on LJ backups with a new script that may be more useful for people. Also added caveats. And stuff.

LJ Press Release

"We're not going anywhere!" This is about what I was suspecting -- there will still be LJ programmers, but they'll be in Russia, where it's cheaper. The Russian version of LJ has done some cool things, so it's not like the code base is in amateur hands.

You should still back your stuff up.