Print your Blog - The easy way. And the hard one...

December 16, 2008

Ok. You've decided to print your Blog. To make a little book of it's content. A memory. Or a present. Or just want to read your favorite Blog anywhere. Maybe back it up and have a hard copy? Or whatever....
Fortunately, there's a few great options for doing this. And a few bad ones....

SO, WHAT ARE MY OPTIONS?



1. My first choice would be PrintWhatYouLike.com. This is a free web page editor that gives you control of how web pages look when printed. They really did their job for making the Print pages printer-friendly. Advantages:

• the service is so easy to use
• it's free
• you can optimize your print to perfection (online)
• save your document in .pdf or print it directly

Disadvantage is that you'll have to do this for every page. But it's worth it....
Visit the site, and see for yourself...




2. Blog2Print! It's powered by SharedBook.This service offers you to print your blog and turn it into a professionally-published Blog Book. Well, sounds great!
Advantages:
- it's totally Blogger friendly
- you can customize it into detail
- it takes care of your complete content (no matter how big it is)
- it looks great
- it takes just a few minutes

The only disadvantage is: it's not free. But you can't take this as disadvantage. The service is perfect, and it's not a big money after all.....Here's the bill for printing my Blog:

...you can choose Download, and print it for yourself. Which is quite cheap. Or let the company make you a real Book...


3. First thing we all think of is: well, I'll just use File --> Print or CTRL (Apple Key)+ P. End of story.
This sounds easy. And fast. Fast - well, depends. But not so easy if you have hundreds of Posts....
Disadvantage of this method is that you can't really optimize your printing. The print will include website header, sidebar and advertisements.
But for printing a single article (post) this method is golden.

Anyways, if you decide to do it this way, at least consider little bit of optimizing.
Normally, you would use File --> Print, and let the printer do the job. And the result is print of complete web page.
But, if you decide to get rid of some elements in your print (like sidebar and banners, or whatever..), you should do this:
- highlight the text (pictures) you want to print
- go to File --> Print
- in the Print Range dialog, choose Selection
- click Print



4. This would be Blurb. But, unfortunately, it does not support Blogger any more.....But you can still play with it, and try to make a book. Not directly from your Blog, but maybe page by page...





If you find some more, do tell!

Smile!