Blooking
Posted on January 28, 2008 at 9:41 pm by kyliu
Tags: blook, culture, site, wordpress
Filed Under geek | Leave a Comment |
I’ve been looking into blooking lately — partly because, not to sound vain about it, I don’t know whether in 20 years my blog will still be up and running, and I have written a lot of words that I want to keep around (hey, it’s a lot of work), and partly because it’s easier for many people to read a printed book rather than something on a screen. (Cf. my thoughts on the Kindle.)
These days blooking is a fairly popular topic, and you can start with Blooking Central to get the lay of the land. On-demand printer Lulu even offers a Blooker Prize. A lot of sites like Blurb will, with a minimum amount of fuss, turn your blogs into blooks pretty much automatically.
For maximum control over the formatting of your blook though, you have to be ready to do a lot of work on your own to get the typesetting, layout and design to your satisfaction. The general goal is to get to a press-ready PDF file that you can send to a printer like Lulu.
This isn’t really hard if you keep your blog in a modern database-based blogging system like WordPress. You can easily write a script that will extract the text of the posts so that you can format them to your specifications. In the spirit of openness and sharing, users have also contributed various plugins and scripts to take care of the tedious parts for you: if you are truly motivated, for example, you can try out the WPTeX plugin, which “turn[s] your wordpress blog into a PDF eBook using LaTeX.”
I personally recommend Connor Boyack’s blooking script, which extracts posts from a specified date range and wraps the relevant blocks in CSS styles that you can then style and modify to your taste. The script is clean and simple, making it easy to customize. My favorite feature is the way it extracts links from your posts and converts them into footnotes, a step that has to be done right for blooks to look good.
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