On Vox: LiveJournal on life support. ARCHIVE YOUR LJ!
As reported earlier this morning by , the Russian owners of LiveJournal, Sup, have laid off 20 of LJ's 28 employees, leaving only accountants and operations personnel. Product managers and engineers are all gone.
The Russian Bear slashes a social network
In the event that the worst happens, I HIGHLY recommend you backup your entire blog. You can use LJ's export service, here: http://www.livejournal.com/export.bml, but you have to do each month individually which is a pain in the ass and can take a long time if you've been blogging for years, like I have.
What I strongly recommend is a small program called LJArchive. It's Windows-only and requires .NET (which most of you probably have but is easily downloaded from Microsoft), but it very quickly and easily saves every LJ entry, comment, and user pic, and lets you view them offline as well as export them to several different journal viewers.
Screenshot:
Now, none of this means that Sup will actually shut the thing down, but I don't trust them not to. I had serious misgivings when Six Apart sold the thing to Sup in the first place, and it seems they were on the mark.
In the meantime I may dust off my Vox account and start posting there (with cross-posting to LJ). gearjock has already created an account there and joined my flist ("Neighborhood" in Vox).
It lacks some features I really like about LJ, like per-post user pics and mood settings, but in other ways it's much more customizable and media-intensive. If LJ goes down the drain maybe a mass migration over there is in order.
Originally posted on nerdimusprime.vox.com