6 years of life on a tiny chip

[tugrik]

Major, major props to waywind, who was kind enough to point me at a service called LJBook.com. It's the tool I've been trying to find for years now.

In short, it takes your journal and makes a very well constructed PDF backup of it. It lets you pick the date ranges, what security levels, how much of the media (pictures) to include, and so on. Then it bundles it all up into a .PDF file with a full table-of-contents, broken in to date-wise chapters. All comments are included, as well. The end result is wonderfully readable, unlike countless other LJ-Backup tools I've tried.



Turns your journal into a PDF Book.


LJBook (gads_ljbook)


(yes, that's their official 'plug' code; I felt it was only proper to include it.)

I feel a lot better now knowing that my journal is backed up in an offline fashion that's still searchable/readable. I've put a huge amount of my life's last six years into this journal, and if it all went away one day without warning I'd be crushed. As I type this the data is making it to physical media and remote storage. I'll re-do the process every few months, breaking it down into year-wise .PDF booklets at the year ends.

The current stat: 4800 pages. 60Mb. Just... duuuude. That's a lot of stuff for "oh, I think I'll just keep a journal for a while and see how it goes."

The nifty thing, though, was to take the MobiPocket reader (which I have to run under Parallels, but no worries there) and convert the "My LJ as a Book" result into the .mobi format. The reason: my Kindle can use .mobi natively. I've copied the result over to an SD card to sit alongside the big collection of sci-fi, fantasy and trashy romance novels I keep in the little e-paper device. Even after the double-conversion, it looks great. All the pictures show up. All the comments are there. Every link, every tag, every note. The chapters all work as do the search indexes, letting me quickly scan for things I've written years ago. As an added bonus, every link is still clickable due to the Kindle's EVDO connection and built in browser. The active linking helps keep the 'alive' nature of the original online journal.

It may be silly, but it's kind of neat to see this little leather-bound book (which is what a Kindle looks like when closed) sitting here on my desk, knowing just how much of my life -- and comments from my friends about that life -- it contains. What will it look like to me when I go back and read it in 10 years? 20? 30?

Comments

[quoting-mungo.livejournal.com]

That is a very nice tool! Thanks for the link, I'll definitely have some use for that.


-Alexandra

[http://users.livejournal.com/krin_o_o_/]

And then.. you could go really radically retro...

And have a dead tree version made off a small press publisher!

[silverjames.livejournal.com]

Wow! That is very cool awesomeness! Thanks for the head's up, Tug. You always finds the coolest stuffs! And you are always so good about sharing said cool stuffs with those of us who are pretty much clueless about the whole "intrwebz thang".

[foxfeather.livejournal.com]

What a neat idea! Thanks for sharing. :)

[wingywoof.livejournal.com]

Cool link.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

This just removed my desire to write my own backup script; thanks! };>

Minor quibbles:

• It requires me to give it my LJ password (vs. letting me archive the public parts without it).
  
• It uses LaTeX internally, but won't give me the LaTeX source for the document, which would be more useful to me.
  

Still an extremely nifty utility!

-Deuce

[reveille-d.livejournal.com]

Puh-puh-parallels?!? Say it ain't so, Tug! Say it ain't so! 9_9

[mythos-amante.livejournal.com]

I'm doing it, because I too would hate to lose all that info should something happen to the current journal. But I also am always a little leery of what happens if someone from that company reads my private stuff? Like, you just never know if they are keeping a digital copy for themselves. And it's not that I'm particularly newsworthy right now, it's just a privacy/personal info insecurity feeling on my part.

But this is WAY cool!

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

I failed at this.

Will have to re-read the instructions and see what I did wrong I guess.

[tigrise.livejournal.com]

I really like this idea but it will not work for me. It keeps kicking back an error.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

If you invoke it more than twice within the same hour, it gives a not-very-helpful error screen. The fine print says that it explicitly limits you to this to reduce load on its server. This might be what's happening (not sure, but it showed up very quickly for me).

-Deuce

[tigrise.livejournal.com]

"No PDF produced.

Your login/password is incorrect
OR
You must convert your journal to UTF-8"

Now the thing is I've done the UTF-8 conversion, so I know that's not it. And I know my username and password. So it's completely meaningless and unhelpful error.

[tugrik.livejournal.com]

It also pitches that error if you've failed more than once and are retrying before you let a few hours pass.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

That's the error message I received. It seems to give that one for every error. If you read about 8 lines down, it has the line about "you're only allowed 3 of these per hour". Trying to do more than about 2 (from what I've found), gives this message. You may have encountered it for this reason, or for another completely unrelated reason. My point is, that's another variable to keep track of.

-Deuce