Codexed.com

[Ezrae]

One thing I had planned on doing with my d-x backups was formatting it in a way that was printable, and then printing each year out at someplace like Kinkos where it could be bound into a book.

Digital backups are a very good thing, but when a series of mishaps occur (in my case, my own hard drive crash, backup DVD's corrupt, and then d-x going down... I'm still working on seeing what I can do about data recovery on my own system to retreive my backups.., heh.) backups can be lost for good. Paper isn't all that reliable either, but one more layer of retention is always a good thing.

Anyhow, a digital backup that is re-importable to the service is critical - but perhaps an option, that outputs the site, in a more printable format, like straight text without the code options to make it re-importable, or even pdf for example, would be a neat feature sometime down the road as well.

Just a thought.

~Ezrae

[Colitis]

[Ezrae]

[Stephen Deken]

BlogBinders ( http://blogbinders.com/ ) offered this service and Diary-X once had an export function for that.

[Ezrae]

Wow, that's a neat link! I'm bookmarking that one!

Thanks!
~Ezrae

[Eadwine Rose]

[From The Inside]

Any new sites that will take your archives and print them?

Curt / InsideAceJr

[bean-with-bacon]

It seems that BlogBinders.com has shut down, but the site does have a link to Lulu, which provides free publishing services. According to the tour, all you have to do is set up your source file (e.g. Word document) so it's the right size; import it into Lulu; enter the book title, author and copyright info, etc.; choose a binding and cover art; set selling and royalty prices; and away you go. I did a quick search and found out about this guy who used Lulu to successfully republish a now-out-of-print book he wrote, which he now sells.

<techspeak>What's interesting is that, to make the book, he converted the document that stored his book in DocBook XML format and then fed that file into Lulu. So if there were a way for Codexed to export the a journal as a DocBook XML file (which would be less effort for Codexed to generate, I'd think, since it'd be composed of text-only characters), it wouldn't be hard to have it printed and bound by Lulu (or some other service that imports DocBook XML).</techspeak>

[Ezrae]

I used both Blogbinders and Lulu to print parts of my archives. It's not so simple to just upload and go with Lulu as it was with Blogbinders.

Lulu does not provide any kind of formatting/editing. What you upload is what you get. Meaning, if you forget to put page numbers in your document (Like I did), then there are no page numbers in your printed book. If you forget to put in an Index, it won't appear. Same goes for title page and copyright page and any other formatting. You have to create each page exactly how you want it to appear in the book.

One of the bonuses of Lulu over Blogbinders is that they can print in full color. It makes the cost of the book nearly double, but with full color printing you can keep all of those images that you may have posted in your entries, and the print quality is actually pretty good.

I experimented with a lot of ways to get my old archive into a good enough format for Lulu. A straight text file meant a whole lot of editing in Word to get the headings, dates and fonts just the way I wanted them. What I ended up doing instead was load everything into Movable Type, set up the template to be close to how I wanted it to look in the book, reverse the chronology so that oldest was on top, and then cut and paste from each monthly archive into Word. From there, all of the styles and photos were preserved, and I could make adjustments very easily with the built in Styles and Formatting tool.

I guess my point here is that even if Codexed were to export into a file format that's Lulu compatable there's a lot you'll want to do before it's ready to print. There's a lot to consider when building a book with Lulu.

~Ezrae

[Lukewarm-Sentiment]

You know, I had tried to use the export feature way back when, and for some reason, every single time I tried, there was always an error right before the thing would finish up, and nullify all the time my poor 2kbps connection had spent on it. I dunno how willing I would be to manually format 1400 entries into something suitable for Lulu, even if I had saved it. But the book feature is a pretty neat idea.

I had heard something from a little birdie, though, that by using one of the publishing sites like Lulu, they somehow hold the copyright for your material. Probably just a silly rumor. Leastways, I hope it was.

I wonder why I've never heard of Lulu before... even with the doubled pricing for printing in color, you're right - the quality is well worth it. I'm in awe.

[Ezrae]

I don't know about the others but Lulu does not hold the copyright for your work:

http://www.lulu.com/help/index.php?fSymbol=lose_rights