For those of you who still want to copy your OD entries, I'm reposting here.
I was not going to copy and paste every single entry to save my diary and I tried using the code that one OD-er had posted, but it had a syntax error and I have no idea what that means. So I had resolved to letting the diary disappear. But I did some googling and discovered that there is something called a “web scraper” that will basically copy all the text from a website for you. It’s free and I tried it out on my diary and it worked for the text of my diary. I was able to copy an entire year (300+ entries) in less than 15 minutes. It only copies text though. (I have not been able to figure out how to save the pictures…yet.) I also want to emphasize, this is easy. Like I said, I didn’t even know what a web scraper was until last night and I am no computer genius. But I am willing to learn. It took me a couple tries to get it right, but I got it to work and everything is now saved in just a few hours. Here’s how:
You will need to do this on a laptop or desktop, it does not work on phones.
Open the Chrome Browser and go to https://chromewebstore.google.com/ . Search for Easy Scraper and download it.
Next, still in the Chrome browser, go to Open Diary and go to your Diary page that lists your entries. To copy an entire year at once, enter the year you want to copy in the search field, leaving the month as is. Keep clicking on “Load More Entries” until the entire year’s entries are listed. (Warning! If you’ve clicked your way to the first entry of the year and click Load More Entries again? Bad idea. You have to start over. Yes, learned this the hard way.)
Next, click on the extension icon at the top of the page, to the right of the web address (there’s the web address, then a star, then a puzzle piece looking icon-that’s the extensions icon) and click on Easy Scraper to open it.
In this order, click on Scrape List at the top of the page, leave “Action to load more items” as None, and click on Scrape Each URL.
On the next page, click Continue.
Click on Select the Data. The last entry of that year will appear. You can select/highlight the entire page (which includes notes from others) by moving your cursor outside the entry or you can click and highlight each field that you want to copy. (I didn’t want to include notes, so I clicked on just the Title and the entry.) Don’t worry, you’ll only need to do this on this one entry. When you’ve highlighted what you want to include, click on Finish in the small pop-up box.
Click continue at the bottom of the next page.
On the next page, click Start Scraping and it will start. It lists the number of entries it is scraping. 365 entries takes about 15 minutes.
Once it is finished, you can click Copy and then Paste it into a Word document. I recommend creating the Word Doc before you’re ready to paste so it will be open and ready. If you try to “Download” it, you’ll get is a spreadsheet with the data you see on in the scraper page, which I guess could be helpful if you want to import it somewhere but I don’t know how or whether it works or not.
Good luck!
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