Lucky for us Warren Meyer, "Coyote Blog: Dispatches from a small business," wrote about blookifying his blog in his October 26, 2005, blogpost.
At the time, he says that there were "only two direct print from blog options" that he could find. Two years later, one that was on his list has gone out of business (BlogBinders); the other was unnamed. In a recent search I found four: QOOP Blog Printing, LAB Aprise!, Blurb.com, and pyxlin. [Do you know of others?]
However, Meyer chose neither of the two companies who specialized in blog-conversion, turning instead to print-on-demand self-publishing. CafePress was briefly considered before he settled on Lulu. Spurring his choice was a novel that he contemplated self-publishing and in his words, "I wanted to give Lulu a test spin."
Since a year's worth of blog archives yielded a humongous amount of material, Meyer chose the 8½ by 11 size to reduce the page count. After downloading Lulu's template, he faced the daunting task of reversing the order of the posts on his blog and pasting them.
Consider for a moment how you yourself would tackle this. Even thinking about it is not for the faint-hearted. Taking it in two steps, 1) reverse the order and 2) paste them into a template.
According to Meyer, he "had to temporarily change the way the blog publishes." [I didn't know you could do that. Cool. Can somebody tell me how?]
Pasting not a problem either, you say? "I did some trial and error - cutting and pasting out of Explorer gave different results than out of Firefox. Pasting as HTML gave different results than pasting as rich text."
Then he went through and edited. He changed fonts, deleted posts, added monthly chapter headings, cleaned up spelling, created an index. Restyling blockquotes gave him fits, "Another important point of style is that blog posts typically quote heavily from other sources as part of the commentary. Rather than using quotation marks, most quotes are indented and printed in italics."
You can read the whole thing yourself, of course. All the gory details. But I'd like to highlight something Meyer said that really struck me. He quotes from his forward to Coyote Blog, Volumes I & II:
The real advantage of blogging, beyond its immediacy and low-cost reach, is the ability to link other online sources to extend or provide backup for a particular article, called a post. Throughout this print record, you will see phrases that are underlined like this. In the original electronic version, these were links where readers could click through to view related material on other web sites. I have chosen to leave this underlining in this text version, as an aid to understanding where richer content was available to the original online readership.
UPDATE: I wrote to Warren Meyer and asked him about reversing the order of the posts:
I went into the defaults for my blog and actually changed this option, to publish the monthly archives with oldest at the top, newest at the bottom. Then I republished the whole site. Then I went through each month's archive and capied the HTML. Then I went back to the options and switched the order back and republished again. I did it late at night so readers would not be too confused.
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