I created a Drupal module to import diary entries to a Drupal 4.6.3 website. It uses Advogato's XMLRPC interface to download a specified user's diary entries to a Drupal blog, page, or story module during regular cron jobs. Trying to import over ~20 diary entries at a time can timeout during a regular cron job, even on a fast server, with a big pipe. The unlimited import setting is only intended if you run the cron.php file from a command prompt, in shell script form, rather than as a web file through the documentation recommended wget or lynx initiated cron jobs.

Using the XMLRPC interface turned out to be much easier than figuring out how to account for every little exception when trying to extract from the /person/user/diary.xml XML file. I'm licensing it under the Artistic License, which is under some debate as to whether it is compatible with Drupal's GPL licensing. In either case, non-GPL licenses are generally not welcome in Drupal as a result of some very vocal contributors.