LiveJournal Amnesia

One day my spouse says to me

Didn't you used to have a LiveJournal?

Yes. Yes I did. I went diving through the internet pipes and found that blast from the past. What I read there... well I don't want to talk about it. In fact, I don't want anyone to talk about it. To that end, I created LiveJournal Amnesia!

This project provides a simple script forget.rb which uses the livejournal gem to fetch all of your posts and mark them as private. A more thorough purging would delete the posts but I figured I might want them some day when I am feeling especially nostalgic/masochistic so instead we'll just repress them like bad memories never to be brought up in polite company.

To Forget

1. clone this repo
2. cd into it
3. run bundle install
4. Copy the .env.example file to .env then replace the defaults with your LiveJournal username and password
5. Run ruby forget.rb

Encoding Problems

At some point in the mid/late 2000's LiveJournal standardized all posts to Unicode. Prior to that the encoding of posts was unknown. It is possible that the LiveJournal API will refuse to serve you posts if it doesn't know what encoding to use. You can fix this by:

1. Log in to LiveJournal in a web browser
2. Go to the OldEncoding Settings Page
3. Set the default encoding to something reasonable for you. If you don't know which one to pick just use "Western European (ISO)"