Printing Our Weblog

We’ve now been blogging since 2005 and my blogging intensities seem to go from strength to strength. It’s surprising how much happens in the life of a small family living a ‘Simple Life of Luxury’ in Wales and I’m forever encouraged by the number of people who read this weblog.

I’m not saying the content is particularly exciting, engaging or thought-provoking, it was never intended to be, although it is varied and it does seem to keep quite a few people entertained, sometimes educated and up to date with our lives. It’s a bit more than a personal diary as I simply write about whatever is on my mind. One day it could be things we’ve been doing or places we’ve been, the next it could be a review of a technology gadget I’ve managed to get my hands on. Sometimes its gardening advice other times it’s questions that I need help with. It all goes on the blog and hopefully someone somewhere finds it interesting.

I’ve been looking back through some old posting lately and it’s actually quite nice to reminisce  and for a while I’ve been toying with the idea of printing the weblog into a series of books to keep on the bookshelves for us to view whenever we want. I think they’d make nice keepsakes, especially as we don’t really have photo albums these days.

There are a number of services that will automatically convert a weblog into a printed book. Most of these work with weblogs on hosted services such as blogger.com, blogspot or WordPress, but none seem to work for self-hosted blogs on your own server. The idea is good and I’m sure it would work quite well but with any automated service such as that there are bound to be a few minor issues with layout etc.

I did think about automating the process myself by creating a separate stylesheet for our weblog and hacking WordPress a little to  display posts on a month by month basis and reverse the order in which posts appear. They normally appear in a reverse chronolgical order so that the most recent is at the top. If I was creating a book of posts for a given year I would want to start at the beginning of the year and end at the end.

I played around with a few ideas, but in the end decided that a manual approach, although time consuming, would give the best results. It’ll take me a while to do but I’m just going to go through the weblog one month at a time, copying and pasting the content into a Desktop Publishing application from which I can create a pdf file for printing. There are many advantages to this manual approach.

  1. It will give me complete control over the layout so that I can make it look like a ‘proper’ book.
  2. I can embed the original, high quality, high resolution photos into the document rather than using those that I had optimised for the web.
  3. I can add comments to posts if I wish
  4. I can if necessary omit some posts here and there

The only downside is the time it will take – Which will be considerable.

I’ve made a start though and the book for 2005 is almost ready. I might try the PDF to Book service offered by Blurb to get it printed. Here are some screen shots of a few of the pages – displayed as two-page spreads. I think it will look good.

6 Responses

  1. Avatar forComment Author Alan says:

    Well, the manual approach worked well for the overall layout of the book but I hit problems when it came to submitting the finished pdf file to Blurb:

    They insist on a PDF/X-3:2002 formatted pdf and it has to be version 1.3

    Now, the Quartz pdf engine built into Mac OSX produces version 1.4 pdf’s so that didn’t work. There is an export to pdf/X option from within the print to pdf settings but that only seemed to work from within Pages for a single page at a time. The document it created was fine for Blurb but I couldn’t get it to do the whole page.

    The next thing I tried was converting the pdf to version 1.4 within Adobe Acrobat Pro. Actually, I don’t have Acrobat Pro anymore so Mark Davies at Swansea University kindly converted it for me, but that didn’t work either.

    I’ve tried other things now such as creating new profiles within ColorSync on the Mac and using those to produce the pdf but none with any joy.

    It seems as though my only options at the moment are wither to use Adobe InDesign for the layout of the book – I don’t have InDesign anymore and it isn;t cheap. Or, use the Blurb BookSmart application to layout the book. I’ve tried this and I don’t really like it as it feels a bit clunky and doesn’t give me the flexibility and control that I want.

    In the end I worked out a bit of a kludge to get around it, but it’s a little tedious to do and I’m as yet unsure of the quality it will produce. Here’s what I did.

    1. Create the overall layout of the book in Pages
    2. Export that as a pdf file
    3. Open the file in Adobe Photoshop – This process opens each page as a separate document and rasterises it as it does so.
    4. Save each of the pages as a PNG image file
    5. Create a blank book within the Blurb BookSmart application with empty, full-bleed picture layouts for each page.
    6. Import the PNG images and place them on the relevant pages within the BookSmart application.

    Following the steps above I end up with a copy of my book in the BookSmart application without having to do all of the layout in it. I can then use the BookSmart application to produce and upload a pdf file that is compatible with Blurb’s requirements.

    I’ve done this with the 2005 edition of ‘A Simple Life of Luxury’ and have ordered one copy. I’ll see what the quality is like before doing any more editions as I’m not sure if the process of creating a PNG file will have reduced the quality of the text.

    I’ll let you know how it goes.
    Al.

  2. Avatar forComment Author shem of wales says:

    Would there be any quicker way of doing it using Quark or similar? A
    Like the pages they look cool. Im looking at getting a big report printed now, approximately 20,000 words, any suggestions on printers to use?

  3. Avatar forComment Author Alan says:

    Just thought I’d add to this by saying that the first book (printed by Blurb) came out really well. There are a few little things that I will change for the next one – but they are issues with my layout rather than the printing.

    Click here for a preview of the book

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Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.

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