Here are a few links that look at publishing your blog as a book. I don’t mean getting a book deal, per se, but actually creating a printed & bound version of your website.
- LiveJournal Book (via Kottke)
- Blog to PDF resource?
- Printing your book at CafePress
My thought here is that there ought to be an easy way to create something from XML output of the blog or a clean, print ready CSS sheet and feed that through…what…as a PDF? This isn’t an immediate need for me, but it would be kind of cool, I suppose.
I’ve actually been considering this lately, one hang-up for me would be the conversion from links to footnotes (after all, we don’t want to lose that precious resource, right?).
It could actually be a fun project. A script to convert an RSS feed to PDF (with formatting and links as footnotes) would be a great first step.
This could be interesting. Would be a neat thing to give a grandparent, kid, etc.
I ended up just ignoring the links issue when I published the first year of Portland Communique via CafePress in two volumes. It would be nice to have them as footnotes though, I agree.
And I ended up having to create a separate MT template for monthly archives, and then cutting and pasting that into a word processing document. Dumping directly to PDF didn’t work in terms of margins and spacing and whatnot (I forget the specifics of what didn’t work right).
(Why two volumes? Because all told, the first year came to nearly 1000 pages, technical manual size. And that’s too large for CafePress to handle as a single book.)