I've been looking into the possibility of crafting a garden blook out of some pretty amazing photographs that a friend has been posting. While garden blooks are a topic for another day, I came across something about Blurb, blogs, and photo books that is relative to our on-going discussion of software.
First, I found a post by Connor Boyack which mentioned the Blurb couldn't handle WordPress blogs that weren't hosted by WordPress.com. I hadn't seen that anywhere else and since I have a WordPress blog that isn't at WordPress.com, I was all ears for what Connor had to say:
January 27th, 2007
For a few months now, I’ve wanted to create a blook (blog + book) from the posts I’ve written in 2006 (something like the Lifehacker book). I’ve been waiting for Blurb to get around to it, but their application can only import wordpress blogs that are hosted on wordpress.com. Since my blog is hosted remotely, that’s a no go. I exchanged a couple emails with somebody at their company who informed me that sometime in 2007 their program would have the ability to import all wordpress blogs, regardless of the hosting situation.
By his own admission Connor is not a patient person. So he went ahead and wrote his own script to extract all posts and comments based on a user-specified date-range, then strip links and convert URLs to footnotes [see the problematic result of this with Blurb]. Connor's script will pull everything into a browser window as an HTML which can then be saved to your computer. He then used Pages from Apple (as opposed to Word or InDesign) to style, format, etc. The script and more details are available in his post.
I followed a link to Connor's friend Ben's blog, Top of the Mountains, where he, too, had a post about Blurb. Unlike Connor, Ben wanted to make a book from his photographs, not his blog. The guys had a discussion in the comments section that is worth eavesdropping on -- except for the rude agist remark about Blurb "aiming at the Grandma market" -- I'm not a grandma but I am a woman of a certain age.
Ben:
This is a photo book compiled by me from my Flickr photos. You just download their BookSmart software (runs on both Mac and Windows), slurp in your photos, and drag them into place. It’s very easy. (I do wish they had more flexibility with the layouts, but they’re aiming at the Grandma market.)I think I’d rather do my blog book ... through Lulu, though — a blog book seems to me to be more text-centric ... and Lulu’s better at that. It would also be much cheaper — 300 pages with Lulu would be $10, far cheaper than the $60 with Blurb.
Connor:
As far as I’ve seen thus far, Lulu offers no automation for converting a blog into a book. You have to copy/paste and format all the text into a document yourself, correct?
Ben:
True. For those who don’t know how (or want) to pull the text in themselves, Blurb would probably be better. For me, though, it’s easy enough to pull the text from MySQL (along with comments) and tag it appropriately so I can use regular expressions to assign styles in Word (InDesign doesn’t do regular expressions yet) and import it into InDesign ready to go. Besides, the graphic designer in me strongly prefers having control over layout. :)I'm curious to know if either gentleman has created his blook yet, aren't you? I'm also wondering if either has explored the other options that I've presented here: BlogPrinting; Blog2Print; pyxlin; Prince; or PrintMyBlog.
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