Some of you might know that almost a year ago we started a website for The Sommerer Family. My cousins Sam and Rachel wanted us to help put something together to make organizing family reunions easier as well as just keeping people in communication during the rest of the year.
After nearly a year, I’m going to call it a success. A dozen or so people contribute pictures, video, stories and news to the site, and around 40 family members post comments on the site. Oddly enough, cousin Sam has never commented on the site. I think he’s waiting for just the right time.
Anyway, my dad doesn’t believe in the internet. So I think the only time he’s seen the website is when he comes to visit us or when my mom prints something out and shows it to him. Luckily, the internet was ready for my dad.
- Step 1: Convert your whole website into a pdf with blogbooker. It does an okay job and even makes a table of context.
- Step 2: Convert your pdf file into a book with Lulu. Notice that your book is 357 pages long.
- Step 3: Order book for $21.02 plus $4.99 shipping and handling. Ships in 5-7 days.
Nothing is more fun than watching my dad get worked up because someone remembers something differently than he does, so this should be the perfect Father’s Day gift.
p.s. Mom, don’t print this out for dad to read.
😀 that… is freaking awesome!
Cool! I have wanted to do that to bradaptation, but I didn’t know it was possible, short of manually copying pictures and typing content and comments.
Because I’m lazy, I’ll just ask these questions instead of investigating.
1. Could I do single years instead of the whole website?
2. Does the copy process include comments?
3. How much content translates into a 357 page book?
I want to know what Brad wants to know.
And also, that’s very, very cool.
Some answers…
1) Yes, you can take any continuous subset of dates and use those posts at blogbooker. I just did the posts from 2010 for my experiment. There are also tools that let you be more selective in what you include (this post, but not that post, only these categories, pages as well as posts…) but they were also more complicated, and I was more interested in a quick test to see how it worked.
2) There’s a whole checklist of things you can include or not include. I wanted to include comments, but you don’t have to.
3) That’s a little more than 3 posts a week for 6 months. Additional pages only cost $0.02 each and you can have up to 800 in a book from Lulu. I decided that each post should start a new page which adds to the page count, because you have partially blank pages strewn about. You can also change the font size (8-12 point). I did the largest.
You can also change the layout. You can make your book 2 columns and change the dimensions of the page. I went one column and with the cheapest page size (6×9 like a “trade book”).
My book on 8.5×11 paper with 2 columns and 9pt font and without a page break for new posts was 109 pages, so roughly a third the size of the book I ordered.
4) I added another link to the post that has the whole pdf file if anyone wants to see it.
Don’t you worry that your dad is going to want the whole internet in book form? “Get me that YouTube book.”
HA!!
And Lloyd, that is the sweetest thing in the world to do for your dad!!! You.are.AWESOME!
(psst Lloyd…I don’t believe in exercise….let your magic begin!)
PS—-Great title!
Amazing. Can’t wait to read it. It will be fun to hear what he has to say.
I am finally getting around to doing this and I have a few questions:
1) the cover says something like “low resolution.” Is that good enough quality for printing? If not, how do I get high resolution pics?
2) my whole blog is 3200 pages…a little too big for printing. There is a lot of blank space though, and if I do some editing I am sure I can shrink it down significantly. Do I have to us Adobe to edit it (I would have to purchase it) or is there an open source program that is an option?
Thanks!!
Lloyd’s going to have to field this one. I am completely ignorant of the process. He’s working on a technology flea market, so if he hasn’t answered in a couple of days, smack him in the head. 😉
Sure enough, I missed your comment. I happened to read it because LuLu is having 25% off orders through the 13th, so I thought I should put this year’s book together.
1) You’ll want to upload the highest resolution pictures that you have for the cover art. Computer screens are generally 72+ dots per inch and printing is 300+ dots per inch, so pictures that look good on your screen might not look good in print. It’s actually nice that they let you know that.
2) I try not to do any PDF editing, so I don’t have a good answer for you, but here’s a good spot to start looking.
It looks like there’s a version that creates a Word document instead of PDF. That would be a lot easier to edit. I’m just trying it and don’t know how well it works yet.