{"id":6561,"date":"2010-12-01T08:40:07","date_gmt":"2010-12-01T08:40:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alananna.co.uk\/blog\/?p=6561"},"modified":"2010-11-29T06:49:08","modified_gmt":"2010-11-29T06:49:08","slug":"printing-our-weblog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alananna.co.uk\/blog\/2010\/12\/printing-our-weblog\/","title":{"rendered":"Printing Our Weblog"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

I’m not saying the content is\u00a0particularly\u00a0exciting, 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.<\/p>\n

I’ve been looking back through some old posting lately and it’s actually quite nice to\u00a0reminisce\u00a0\u00a0and 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I did think about automating the process myself by creating a separate stylesheet for our weblog and hacking WordPress a little to \u00a0display 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. It will give me complete control over the layout so that I can make it look like a ‘proper’ book.<\/li>\n
  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.<\/li>\n
  3. I can add comments to posts if I wish<\/li>\n
  4. I can if necessary omit some posts here and there<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The only downside is the time it will take – Which will be considerable.<\/p>\n

    I’ve made a start though and the book for 2005 is almost ready. I might try the PDF to Book<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\t\t