We’re performing some scheduled maintenance work today as we upgrade our systems. Unfortunately, this will involve some downtime of our bookfabrik blogbook service.
Everything should be back to normal on Thursday – and with the new machines, the blogbook layout process should be much faster as well 
As a little bonus, we’ll also release our latest feature upgrade at the same time, but more about that in our next post… stay tuned!
your friendly feedfabrik team
Some blogs make heavy use of tags or categories. So we thought: wouldn’t it be nice to take this information and create something meaningful in a printed book? Well, here is our suggestion: add an index to your book!
Our new feature allows you to have all tags collected and compiled to a special appendix section at the end of your blogbook. The tags are ordered alphabetically and listed with the corresponding page numbers pointing back to the pages of your book. That way, it should be pretty easy to find entries for a specific topic.
We try our best to ensure that the order of entries not only follows the alphabet but also the local conventions of the language. German Umlauts follow different rules from Scandinavian characters, and so on. However, this might fail for some cases (like Arabic or Japanse) so if you spot something unusual for your language, please accept our apologies.
German blogger Wolfgang Stock has written a nice review about our blogbook service on his blog Stockpress.de. If you would like to practice your German language skills, please head over and take a look.
Thanks for the kind words!
We had quite a few requests to introduce a new layout feature for our books.
Until recently, all book chapters were laid out one after the other regardless of page breaks. This is quite normal for a typical book. But now you have an alternative option. If you like, you can now opt to start a fresh page with every new chapter. Of course, that means that the previous page might remain half empty but there are quite a few books where this actually looks quite nice, e.g. when you have many pictures.
The option is available from the Layout Options tab on the left. Give it a try.
In a recent post we wrote about our video support when you create your blogbooks. Supported platforms are Youtube, Vimeo and Xtranormal.
However, things are a bit more tricky when you’re on WordPress.com or WordPress.org. The WordPress platform uses shortcodes to include videos in the blog posts. That means, it is not enough for us to handle normal videos but we also need to detect and treat the special WordPress shortcodes. Well, we’ve done this now. The [youtube ...] and the [vimeo ...] shortcodes are now supported.
We haven’t worked on the other video platforms yet, but our logs show that Youtube and Vimeo are by far the biggest video sources used in blogs. So if you’re missing your special platform, please let us know and we’ll try to stick it in.
We’re very happy to announce a new partnership with WordPress.com.
The team at WordPress.com has developed a new authentication mechanism to help third-party developers like ourselves to securely connect with WordPress.com blogs. The technology is based on the popular OAuth standard. In essence, it means that you no longer need to enter your username and password on our site when you create your blogbook. Instead, we will redirect you to WordPress.com where you login and give permission to us to read your blog data. That means that we never even see your login credentials.
This is not only much easier for our customers, it is also much more secure. We had similar mechanisms implemented with Blogger.com, tumblr, Instagram and Picplz already, and we’re very happy that WordPress.com now joined in.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for your self-hosted WordPress.org blogs yet. The community edition of the WordPress does not have OAuth implemented and still relies on the old username/password mechanism we’re all familiar with. To make this secure in a similar way, we’ve developed a plugin that helps you create your book without sharing your password with us.
Read the partnership announcement directly on the WordPress.com blog. There is also a discount code giving you 10% off any order in September: WORDPRESS-INTRO.
Thanks to the great dev-team at WordPress.com. It’s a real pleasure to work with you guys,
your friendly feedfabrik team
In our last post, we wrote about the new feature of selecting the tags (or labels, categories, however your blog platform names it) of the posts that you would like to see in your blog. That’s very helpful when you cover a wide range of content and would like to print a subset like a special topic in your blogbook.
Now we’ve built on that and introduce a new feature that allows you to also select the post authors you would like to find in your book. Especially if you’re on a multi-user blog with many different authors, it can be desirable to not print plain everything but only a selection of the people you’re interested in. Another use-case are family blogs where the whole family is writing, but you would like to create a specific book of just one person.
The author selection option is only available on the interface if there is more than one author – for obvious reasons it doesn’t make any sense for just one author, right 
We hope you like this new feature,
your friendly feedfabrik team
Many of you asked for it, finally we got it! It is now possible to select the blogposts for the book by tag. Before, the only option was to use the datepicker to define a range of posts for the blogbook. Now, you can also hand-pick the tags to be included.
The logic is that all selection conditions have to apply for a post to be included, i.e. if you set the date range to Jan 2010 to Dec 2010 and select a certain category, than only those posts will be included in the book that are inside the date range and are tagged with your selected tag.
If you’re on WordPress, please don’t confuse yourself. WordPress knows categories and tags. It is the tags that are selected here.
We really hope you like this. We’ve also planned to offer a selection based on blogpost author. This should be very helpful for multi-user blogs. Stay tuned!
This is great news for us (and many of you). We’ve just released one of our most exciting updates of our blogbook software. The new version now comes with video support.
Video support was one of the most requested features and we have to admit it took us a bit too long to get it ready. But hey, video is tricky in a book, right? We’ve been experimenting with all sorts of ways to do this right.
Well, in the end, we opted for something rather simple: We’re just printing the preview frame that appears while the video has not started. While that’s not super sophisticated in the end, it sticks closely to how your blog looks when you read a post with an embedded video. So it felt natural to us.
Right now, we support the two major platforms Youtube and Vimeo. And because we know that some of you love the funny Xtranormal videos, we’ve done those as well.
Please let us know how this is working for you – and if you would like to see another platform supported.
