Comments on: Printing blogs?

By: coturnix

coturnix — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 02:27:07 +0000

Well, I am going with Lulu for a number of reasons:
a – they are in town if I have to go personally to do anything and they have people who can help
b – my neighbor is a blogger who recently published a book with them. He is very satisfied and has promised to help me with formatting
c – They send a preformatted Word file – you copy and paste and send back. In two days, you get the book.
d – I cannot print the whole blog. I have been copying and pasting GOOD posts all along so I have an MSWord file in chronological (as opposed to blog-standard reverse chronological order). When I first heard about this, I looked at the file and it was, dunno, 800 pages or so. And that’s just the chosen “Best of” posts. No memes, cartoons, one-liners, linkfests or carnivals included. By changing the font, reformatting paragraphs, eliminating several mediocre posts, cutting out all the superfluous stuff (unfortunately, that means cutting away lots of links), I got it down to about 450 pages and I am still working on it. Thus, I have to work with a file, copying and pasting to begin with, so that is not a negative for me.

By: Ehud

Ehud — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 15:14:00 +0000

Does any of these solutions work for non English blogs?

By: Bill

Bill — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 19:39:51 +0000

Eszter – Thank you for the comments
-photo ordering choices coming soon
-Cover options coming soon
-And thank you for looking at our blogprinting beta and commenting

– Bill

By: yabonn

yabonn — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 19:18:41 +0000

“Blook”.

The horror. The horror.

By: Eszter

Eszter — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 15:42:33 +0000

Bill, thanks. My Qoop book was shipped on Oct 19th. As I said, I loved the cover (as did my Mom who got it as a gift). And to be sure, the service was very easy to use and quick. I just wasn’t sure if “book” was the right word for it.

While I have your attention:) I thought I’d mention a couple of things that I think would be helpful tweaks to that service.

First, if I recall, it was not possible to specify the order of the pictures. I recall redoing the entire book after having rearranged the sets in my Flickr account just so some of the pictures I wanted at the end would be at the end. I was able to adjust the set ordering this way, but I don’t think it’s possible to specify the order of the photos individually, is it?

Second, I don’t recall having any say in what photos show up on the cover. I liked the random selection this time, but I think I would prefer to have some say over that.

And thanks for putting me in touch with the BlogPrinting folks!

Coturnix – Lulu seems like a great service for creating products from various types of content, but I don’t recall seeing any quick method for converting blog posts into a book format. (I am not going to sit and copy/paste all posts. I am looking for an automated method. What I’ve been shown of the BlogPrinting beta seems extremely promising. It addresses that point very well.)

John – That is a funny coincidence. I suspect to some extent it may have to do with the upcoming holidays. Perhaps people are looking to make gifts. In my case it’s related to the end of the teaching quarter and a student’s idea, as I noted.

By: John Holbo

John Holbo — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 09:28:41 +0000

It’s an amazing coincidence that you made this post, Eszter. Just today I was emailing someone with questions about this very issue and got sent to Qoop. Then I clicked over to CT … and you could have answered my questions for me. To the extent that they have answers at this stage. Also, just two weeks ago I was at a meeting joking about ‘blooks, blarticles and blessays.’ Something in the water causing everyone to think of certain print issues at once.

By: godoggo

godoggo — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 07:38:10 +0000

I know this is almost 5 years out of date, but Hal dispensed a punch card when Dave asked him for a hard copy.

By: coturnix

coturnix — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 05:28:53 +0000

From what I heard, Lulu.com is the best in terms of speed, price and quality. And if you hurry up, you can enter your blog-turned-book for the Blooker Prize. Hey, a $1000 is not nothing…

By: Bill

Bill — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 00:36:40 +0000

Eszter –
When did you order a photo book? We started using a new photo paper about a month ago that is very nice.

And our BlogPrinting.com makes very cool books – our lead on that project will contact you.

– Bill

By: Reed A. Cartwright

Reed A. Cartwright — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 21:25:30 +0000

I run Movable Type on my blog and a few months ago, I added a feature that automatically creates PDFs of my entries.

Using LaTeX one could take all the PDFs and combine them together in some book format.

By: Michael H.

Michael H. — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 17:03:58 +0000

Sorry, I did not notice that you had linked to that post.

He later denied it was all that tedious. Anyway I assumed you were going to have your students do the work, it really wouldn’t be that much trouble for them. They might learn something too.

By: Eszter

Eszter — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:38:33 +0000

Michael – I link to that discussion in the post.

Kieran & Chris – Thanks. Those sound like possibilities, but I’m hoping for something simpler.

By: Chris Karr

Chris Karr — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:36:59 +0000

I don’t know if any blog services or software do this, but a somewhat simple and flexible solution would be to generate a full-text RSS feed of each entry (and comments if desired), and use XSLT to FOP (http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/), then turn that into a PDF with the styling you want.

Granted, this feed would be huge (it’s essentially a database dump), but you don’t have to allow access to it. The feed would also be useful if you want to add your blog contents to search engines like A9 or Google Base.

By: Michael H.

Michael H. — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:03:40 +0000

Warren Meyer of Coyoteblog (a nice blog) recently wrote of his experiences publishing his blog as a gift for his dad (a nice idea). He used lulu.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 15:31:39 +0000

There’s a WordPress to PDF plugin that uses LaTeX as a formatting engine and (I think) understands textile formatting etc. I tried it once for CT and it worked pretty well, but I didn’t pursue it. It’s something you need to install on your server, though. Here’s the Project Page href=”http://wp2pdf.sourceforge.net/” rel=”nofollow”>http://wp2pdf.sourceforge.net/ at sourceforge.