This is BrainLog, a blog by Dan Sanderson. Older entries, from October 1999 through September 2010, are preserved for posterity, but are no longer maintained. See the front page and newer entries.

March 10, 2004

Turn your blog into a book. Not sure why you'd want to. A couple of years after I told my father I had a blog, I was surprised to discover that he had printed out the entire contents of my archives. I don't mind, but it seems so contrary to the idea, especially of the sort of blog mine tends to be, where the real content is in the other sites, not mine. I suppose BlogBinders is expecting more of the journal-type bloggers to be interested in having a bound paper archive, but even there the idea seems out of place. An archive seems secondary to the purpose of sharing the latest entries with the world. With paper diarists, I would expect the paper keeps a record so the sharing takes place later, if at all; I suppose a print edition of an online journal would play a similar role for those who hadn't read the web edition. In my case, my archive is of value to searchers (including myself) as a haphazard repository of information and links I'd collected. For link blogs like mine, the older the entry, the less valuable it is, as the links go bad. I've considered setting up automatic deletion of posts older than X years...

Someone ought to be offended by BlogBinders's slogan: "Turn your blog into reality." As if a word is worthless until it's on paper.

comments...

Dumb father. Actually, I don't know where you got the idea that I printed out the entire contents &c. (Why would I wreck my printer?) There are times, of course, when hard-copy is preferable to electronic, no?

I got the idea that you printed out the entire contents of my blog from the ream-sized stack of printouts of my blog entries I saw in your study once. On the laser printer at your office or something. It was a couple of years ago.

hm, I see it more as an offline backup.



Since my blog functions more or less as my old notebook/sketchbooks once did, i like the idea. Hope it's not priced like a computer program though.



and, btw dad sanderson - my dad mischaracterizes his creative efforts to manage computing-era things as 'dumb' too. I don't know if your son is either as polite (?) or conflicted as I am, but I hate it when my dad calls himself dumb. Yet, it's hard for me to correct the man that taught me more than anyone else.

mmph.



no images. thppbbt.

For the record, my dad was calling himself dumb because he just called himself "smart" in another comment on a post from yesterday.



My father is no techno nerd, but he's never been dumb with technology. His Kaypro 4 had a modem.



And he used it to import my entire blog archive into WordStar.

ah, kaypros.



dbase II...



ah yes, I remember it well...

wait, i just processed that.



He imported the ENTIRE BLOG into WS on a Kaypro 4 via modem.



Your dad's no dummy, he's a HACKER. he 0wnzor2 dj00 in C/PM!

(I was kidding about importing the blog into WordStar, BTW. He ditched the Kaypro years ago, at my protest.)

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