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.

Thanks for the kind words!

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.

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.

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

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

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!

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.

• Insert QR codes that link a scanning phone straight to the video
• Generate filmstrips with little frames spread through the video
• Make a collage
• Simply leave them out (ok, no option, we know)

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.

• European languages now have much better support when using the Latin script. That means, also these German Umlauts, French accents, Scandinavian special characters, etc… are now fully supported.
• Non-latin scripts like Arabic, Greek, Cyrillic or Thai are also supported. Chinese and Japanese characters are not stable, though. Please let us know how this works for you.
• We’ve also changed the fonts used for the books to something more pleasing (to our taste). If there is interest, we can make fonts an option.

Overall, the whole process should be more stable as well. We’re working hard to get this bug free. If your book has zero pages, please get in touch with our support team and we’ll try to get it fixed.

She’s even included a link to her blogbook at the bottom of her post.

The folks at tumblr really did a great job with their new API. One big advantage is the OAuth authentication scheme. We’ll spare you the technical details, but in essence, it means that you no longer have to enter your password on our site. Instead, you simply click the “create my book” button and we’ll redirect you to tumblr. At tumblr, you can then grant us access to your blog and tumblr will redirect you back to your site. The login is then automatic and much more secure.

tumblr also changed the way the data of your blog is transmitted between the tumblr servers and us. The new approach looks really well designed and we’re sure that it is more stable than in the past.

So go ahead and give it a try – and tell us how you like it.

For those of you who are a bit more into coding, you can adjust the width and the height of the box to make it bigger or smaller by tweaking the numbers in the copied HTML.

Your visitors can not only admire your book but also click on the link at the lower left corner to be take right to the Feedfabrik site to a full view of the book and the opportunity to download the free print proof file or buy a PDF or printed book.

Let us know how you like this

Before, the system would always take title and author from the source data, e.g. from your blog. It still does that as a suggestion. However, if you feel like changing the title, e.g. because you’re doing annual volumes and would like to put the year on the cover, then you can do that now. Once you’ve connected with your blog or picture site and created your book, click on the Text Settings tab on the left (the big T) and you find the fields to change the text.

Have fun!

Norwegian blogger Hans-Petter was so kind to review our blogbook service on his blog. He has some great illustrations on how to use the blogbook application and also shows you the print proof PDF file of his book. If you speak Norwegian, hop over and take a look. If not, hop over anyway and admire his blog!

Thanks Hans-Petter!

• Introduce encrypted communication for token exchange
• Introduce direct link to customer care
• Improve stability
• Improve compatibility with WordPress 3.2
• Provide option to like us on Facebook

Please let us know how this works for you – and if you like the plugin, please like us on Facebook or rate us on WordPress.org.

If you discover that something doesn’t work for you in our books, please let us know and we try our best to fix it! We’re here to help.

Instagram and Picplz are two popular mobile apps that allow users to make cool snaps on the go and give them a retro look by applying a selection of filters. Instagram right now is exclusive on the iPhone but Picplz can be used on iPhone and Android as well. According to a recent article on Mashable, Instagram by now features over 100 Million photos of 5 Million users and is still growing like crazy.

If you’re using one of these apps you can now create picture books from your photos using our simple bookfabrik application. Go to the start page and select the PICS tab as shown below.

The choose your source and click the “CREATE MY BOOK” button on the right. Both, Instagram and Picplz will ask for authentication first but then the book is created automatically. You can then share your book with friends by sending them the URL link to the flipbook view or even better, order a printed copy for your coffee table.

Please let us know how you like the books and what features you would like to see. This is still in beta stage and we’re happy to integrate your input and thoughts. Have fun!

Whenever you login at bookfabrik and create your very own blogbook, we will store your finished book at a special location and give it its private web address. To give you an example, check this travel and study book here: http://www.feedfabrik.com/bookfabrik/view/zszd8s This will take you straight to the flipbook view.

What does private mean? Well, the link is only known to you, the blogger. We don’t show a list of all books and we don’t share the links. Only if you know the link, you can find the book online. That way, it is completely up to you if you would like to share your book with other people or keep it hidden and private.

But how do you share the book and where do you find the link? That’s easy! You can either simply bookmark the page that shows your book or copy the link from the share tab:

The share tab also allows you to send the book link via facebook to your friends. So it should be straight forward to spread the word! Of course, you can also copy the link over to your blog. Finally, if you buy a book from us, we’ll also send you an email with the link just in case you forgot to copy it before the order.

The book itself can be viewed but not changed anymore. So if you share it with your friends, you don’t risk that anyone messes up your blogbook. However, your friends have the option to order your book.

One thing is important to know: We will host your book only as long as it is in use by you. So if nobody accesses your book for over a month, we assume that you don’t want to keep it and remove it.

Please let us know if you like this feature,
your friendly feedfabrik team

Let us know what you think!

• We fixed a bug that under certain circumstances caused the system to crash when cyrillic letters were used in the blog.
• We fixed some minor bugs for WordPress blogs.
• We introduced an option to print the book with white text on black background.
• We introduced an option to omit the chapter headlines.

The new features can be enabled in the layout options. Take a look at this screenshot:

The new black background feature is especially suitable for photo blogs with little text. Photos stand out from the dark background and the whole book gets a much nicer look. The effect is even stronger when you disable the chapter titles at the same time. We wouldn’t recommend this for blogs with a lot of text, but of course that’s up to you to decide. The preview as always will give you an idea of what to expect.

We are also almost ready to release new covers as we are aware that our two standard designs right now don’t fit everyone’s taste and are not so suitable for stylish photo blogs at all. Please be patient and bear with us.

You can download her whole blog as PDF on her site. If you ever wondered how a large blog turned into a blogbook might look like, you can check it out at her page.

J.A. in her article also discusses eBooks. As a quick note: we’re planning to introduce an eBook service as well, turning your blog into an ePub version. This is still in the early stages right now so don’t expect it to go live too soon. Please let us know, if you would like this and what features you would appreciate. And subscribe to our newsletter if you would like to be informed once we launch it.

Thanks to the folks at bitelia for the great review of our blogbook service. If you’re a Spanish speaker you might want to jump over to their page and check it out.

The review focuses on our facebook birthday calendar, that we create from your facebook social graph. However, the blogbooks are mentioned as well.

Thanks for the review!

Overall, Feedfabrik is leading the pack together with Blurb. That makes us very proud!

As an update, we now support Typepad as well, so make an extra green tick in the line above One big criticism PCM had with us are our covers. Right now, we only offer two predesigned covers and it is clear that this is not enough and doesn’t satisfy everyone. We are aware of that and will change this pretty soon. As a first step, we will introduce many more designs to choose from. Then, we plan to offer customers more freedom to create their own covers. Stay tuned, we’ll announce it here on the blog once it is ready. Or sign up to our newsletter to stay up-to-date.

In case you speak Dutch and would like to read the full article, please grab it here (thanks to PCM).

As an introduction, we give 10% discount to all book orders placed in March 2011. Please use code: LCD-GLQ-BVVF-FAHVB at the checkout.

As Social Media Printservice we’re practically selling a photobook 2.0. There is more and more personal content online on platforms like Facebook, WordPress, Blogger.com or Flickr – and that’s not only images but also text and social relationships. We take that and produce individual print products.

Feedfabrik therefore address the writers of the globally more than 200 million blogs, who can order their texts and images as profesionally layouted blogbooks. The first 100 customers from Europe and overseas showed a strong focus on travel blogbooks and diaries. Facebook users can convert their social graph into a birthday calendar with pictures.

Overall, Feedfabrik is leveraging sustainable trends: personalized print-products are very popular, as can be seen in the growing billion-market of photobooks. As a next step, the company will also launch a b2b service that allows printing of user selected content. First negotiations of cooperations with large media houses are already underway.

Right now, Feedfabrik is 100% founder owned…

If you would like to feature us in your publication, please get in touch!

What’s the catch? It’s all in German! So if you’re not scared by that, jump over to her site kwheft

Anyway, we’ve now launched a new feature that gives everyone a volume discount automatically. When you’ve configured your book, you’ll see a screen where all the discounts are laid out to you. Simply click on a radio button to select the number of copies for your book – or enter any other number into the box at the bottom. The prices are recalculated right away, so that you see your savings immediately.

We hope you like that – and if we run any other promotion you can still enter the discount code on the checkout page and save on top!

VCIC is an annual venture capital investment competition held by MBA students around the world. It is not the classical business plan competition where students pitch to investors. It is the other way around. Students take the role of investors (guided by real VCs and Business Angels) and real companies like ourselves pitch their business plans to the investment committees of students. The student teams get due diligence material beforehand and do their own research in advance. After the pitch, they further scrutinize the companies in Q&A sessions before they negotiate investment term sheets with the company of their choice.

Recently, the Oxford VCIC teams have been very successful, winning the European VCIC Final two years in a row. This may explain why so many SBS MBA students signed up to participate this year. The staff of the SBS Centre of Entrepreneurship must have had a really busy time organizing the VCIC 2011 with so many participants. On the day, all was prepared and the event ran as smoothly as one could hope for.

It was great to get the chance to present to the students – in more than one way. Not all that long ago we were students ourselves (really) and, of course, it is great to have the opportunity “give back”. More importantly, though, it was valuable to get the student’s feedback. The open and unfiltered discussion about our business with a bunch of students who had examined it from various angles (at least a little bit) was very useful. Real-life investors can be way more non-committal in their feedback.

As a subject of the student teams’ due diligence efforts we got a good view of how the teams performed. While some teams were really on the ball and tackled the relevant issues with probing questions other teams did not get past the obvious. A few of teams really stood out. The winner of the VCIC 2011 at SBS should do well at the next level.

The winning team will now go on and compete against other leading European business school teams (like. e.g., from INSEAD, where the Feedfabrik founders did their MBA) in order to then represent Europe in the U.S. for the global finals.

Of course, we wish them good luck!

What language is next? Well, we love Paris and the French, so that’s definitely on the list. And why not Spanish and Italian? If you are a native speaker of any of these languages and would like to help, please let us know by mailing support@feedfabrik.com

your friendly feedfabrik team

In WordPress, you typically have two ways of inserting an image into a post: You can either upload or link the individual image and include it in your text, or you can attach one or more images to your post and let WordPress do the job of building a gallery out of them. Here is an example for a gallery taken straight from WordPress:

The key difference is that the post only contains a so-called WordPress shortcode [gallery] instead of the actual images. The images are attachments to the post similar to email attachments. As a consequence, the standard data interface of WordPress does not transmit the images. So in your blogbooks, these images were simply left out and all you saw was the gallery shortcode in the middle of your text.

Now that’s the past! We’ve changed the way we read the WordPress data from your blog and now all the images are automatically included We hope you like it!

Normally, when you use Bookfabrik with blogger.com, the process is really simple. First, you select Blogger.com as your blog source and click the “create my book” button on the right

Then you are redirected to Google to authorize access to your blog. This way, we will never see your password.

Finally, Google redirects you back to our site and the book preparation process should start right away. However, at the moment you see the following error:

This is pretty strange because Google did verify your access. So what’s going on here?

Well, what’s happening is that Google has a problem with its blogger API at the moment. Our service tries to access your blog once you’ve clicked that “grant access” button. To do that, we have to read your blog feed (now guess where the name Feedfabrik is coming from!). However, once we do that, Google reports an error back to us that looks like this: “Attempted access to row that is not the transaction row” That’s very unusual and hints at a problem with the Blogger database.

We’ve raised this issue right away with the folks at Google and they confirmed the problem. You can read more about this here in the Blogger Developer Forums.

So don’t get frustrated if you can’t produce any blogbooks right now. The smart people at Google are on it and we’ll post an update as soon as the issue is resolved.

So the FAQ is live now and you can reach it from the link at the bottom of any page (or via the nice big button on the right). Keep your questions coming anyway – we like talking to our customers.

In case you had your images hosted on WordPress.com as well and also password protected, our system was not able to access and include them in your blogbook. That has changed now. Our system will also load your private images for your book. There is nothing you have to do – just login normally, the rest is magic.

Your friendly feedfabrik team

In the future, you will receive the following messages from us when ordering a product:

• Confirmation that we received your order
• Confirmation that we received your payment and accepted your order
• Notification when we placed your order into the production queue in our workshop
• Notification when the actual production started
• Notification when the product is ready and we start packaging for shipment
• Notification when the product is shipped to you

In total, these are six emails that keep you on top of what’s going on with your order. We hope this answers your questions and makes the wait a bit easier. Please let us know how you like that and if these messages are the right level of detail or you would rather not receive so many notifications.

At Feedfabrik, we would like to keep you up to speed with things and we know that not everyone is checking our blog all the time (or subscribes to RSS). So we started a newsletter. The newsletter will be rather infrequent to keep your mailbox tidy. But it is a way for us to share the latest news with you and tell you about discounts. Obviously, you can unsubscribe any time if you don’t like it and we will never ever share your email address with anyone else (please see your privacy policy for details!)

You can subscribe by clicking here.

• Normally, the name of the blog author is automatically printed on the book cover. However, quite a few blogs have more than one author and wouldn’t it be nice if all of those could be featured on the cover page? That is what our new “show post authors on cover” option is doing. It goes through all the posts, selects all the names of the post authors and puts them on the cover.
• Our blogbooks typically feature a table of contents that gets generated automatically from all the included blog posts. Some blog writers asked to have that excluded and this is what our second new option “show table of contents” is doing. By deselecting it, the table is not printed. Your choice!

You can find both of the new options in the “Layout Options” menu accessible from the design desk where you preview your book. Simply click the last tab on the left to see all the options.

Have a great new year!
your friendly feedfabrik team

As a valued customer, we would like to help you prepare your annual yearbook from your blog. If you use the discount code: YEARBOOK2010 you will receive a 10% discount on any order until end of January 2011. Use it yourself and pass it on to a friend or the readers of your blog.

In case you’re still looking for a great New Year present to yourself, check our Facebook calendar, which shows the whole year with the pictures and birthdays of all your friends. The download is free.

Have a great holiday, a good start in 2011 and a happy new year!

your friendly feedfabrik team

Simply enter the code XMAS2010 when you order.

The discount is valid until the end of the year.

This is just a minor maintenance release that fixes a rare bug for some installations of WordPress. We had an old bit of code in the plugin that was actually redundant but caused a login hickup on some WordPress sites. As a symptom you would get an error message at login like this:

Warning: call_user_func_array() [function.call-user-func-array]: First argument is expected to be a valid callback, ‘Feedfabrik::authenticate’ was given in wp-includes/plugin.php on line 166

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at wp-includes/plugin.php:166) in wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 717

If you don’t see any error and don’t experience anything unusual, there is no need for you to update.

To address the issue, we’ve made the use of available memory more efficient and also query smaller chunks of data from the database.

There is no need for you to update from 1.4 if you have a short blog or if 1.4 is working fine. There are no new features in 1.5. However, the new version might save those of you with bigger blogs some frustration.

Thanks to the customers who reported the errors to us! These reports are often the only way for us to identify new issues. We answer every single support request and we are working to make this go smoothly for everyone. So please keep the feedback and error messages coming to us.

your friendly feedfabrik team

On the outside it all looks the same and it still gives you just a plain printing button in your Tools menu of WordPress.

However, under the hood we changed quite a few things.

• Incompatibilities with old PHP4 installations are now solved.
• The plugin automatically works around PHP memory constraints for those of you with large blogs. This used to lead to “unspecified technical errors” before – and hopefully are now a thing of the past.
• Some more data interface inconsistencies are solved, for example in case your debug mode of WordPress is running and for whatever reason WordPress decides to write some error messages into the blog data stream during the exchange. We’re filtering for this now.

If you try to use the old versions of the plugin < 1.4 you will now get an error message and won’t be able to transfer your data. Upgrade is simple – just click the update button in the plugins section of WordPress or go here to download the latest version.

A new version 1.4 has been finished today but we’d like to give this another round of testing before doing another update. It works in our labs but some bloggers have been kind enough to offer a trial on their blogs, too. We’ll release it as soon as we got positive feedback.

Stay tuned!

Some key things have changed:

• Security: We’re no longer using the standard WordPress XML-RPC data interface to exchange the data between you and our book software. That means, the plugin now only provides a secured read access instead of using the default read-write-delete access built into WordPress. This should give you some extra peace of mind
• Convenience: Since we don’t use the WordPress XML-RPC interface anymore you don’t have to worry about the thing being enabled or not. Whatever its setting, the plugin should work.
• Quality: Internally, WordPress actually does not store your blog data the way you see it on the screen, but in a “raw” format. The standard XML-RPC interface can only pass the raw format to other applications, but not the processed/filtered blog post that is displayed to your readers. Our new plugin now performs pre-processing of your content so that the formatting of your text can be captured and reflected in your blogbook.
• Reliability: WordPress seems to have a bug when it sends certain data over its standard interface. Our new plugin solves this.

We hope you like it!

In case something goes wrong for you and you experience a strange “technical error” message, please get in touch and together we will try to find out what’s going on and fix it.

your friendly feedfabrik team

For the technically inclined: what’s happening is that we use XML-RPC to transport your blog data from your blog to our application. The data needs to be valid in XML terms. Specifically, some entities (i.e. characters) are not allowed in XML. For some reasone these do appear in a few WordPress datasets and tend to crash any standard-conforming parser. We’re now filtering this in an attempt to avoid the crashes.

In addition, WordPress seems to have a bug that transmits invalid dates. The interface requires dates to conform to ISO 8601. Unfortunately, we found that sometimes – typically for posts with a draft status – the returned dates are some strange negative values and don’t look at all like the ISO standard. We’re not really sure yet why that happens, but for the time being we’re fixing this by excluding draft posts from the blogbooks. For other posts, we try to fix the date with some post-processing.

Both fixes will be released after we had a chance for additional testing, so expect it up and running end of the week / over the weekend. We’ll let you know here about any development.

Go and grab it at the WordPress Plugin Directory.

There have also been quite a few support requests of users who get an unspecified “techical error” when trying to run our application with WordPress. We’re investigating this and it seems that for whatever reason the data received from your blogs sometimes doesn’t adhere to the standard it should. It seems to be a very specific WordPress issue and we try to develop a workaround. As soon as there is a solution, we’ll post it here.

If you want to help us with finding the problem, please send us a message via our support system specifying your blog address and the error message you got. We answer every single request.

Anyway, if you’re not happy with our books, why don’t you give Axel’s tool a spin.

There is an interesting discussion at Blogger World about our new WordPress service (in German). One reader pointed out, that he feels a bit uncomfortable of entering his password into our login box. Well, he has a point. Unfortunately, WordPress out-of-the-box only offers rather simple authentication methods that require the credentials of the blog author. This is different to blogger.com / blogspot.com who switched over to an OAuth authentication some time ago.

OAuth works by issuing an access token to third parties that request access. The token then only allows the defined access and can be revoked at any time. The actual password is never shared.

We thought that this would be a great model for WordPress as well and developed our own Feedfabrik Blogbook Printing plugin. The plugin sits right inside your WordPress admin interface and adds a new Print button in the Tools menu.

Clicking on print creates a unique token that opens read access to your blog for one hour. The token is automatically exchanged with Feedfabrik and your blog data is transported over to our application in a similar fashion to an XML feed, i.e. read-only. Once the token expires, access closes automatically.

Add to that the convenience of preparing and printing your blog right from the admin interface, we believe that this is quite a cool feature.

There is one downside though: The plugin cannot be used on hosted WordPress.com blogs but only with self-hosted WordPress.org blogs. That’s not our fault as WordPress.com does not allow any plugins to be installed. If you think that’s unfair, please use the link to get in touch with the folks at WordPress and request our plugin to be included for everyone. They actually encourage the community to request plugins, so why not ask?

Happy blogging,
your friendly feedfabrik team

We’ve just received the word from one of our most far-away customers that her books arrived safely in Australia. Sandra secured her VOX blog by printing it before the service was shutdown. But read for yourself if she’s happy with our service.

But not only the self-hosted WordPress blogs can now be converted to books, but we also work with hosted blogs from WordPress.com. If you login with your WordPress.com account, our system will always present you all your blogs so that you can choose which one you would like to print.

One note for the users of self-hosted blogs.

Typically, your WordPress blog does not allow data communication with other services out-of-the-box. For security reasons, this is disabled by default. In order to enable it, log into your admin panel, go to Settings > Writing and tick the box next to XML-RPC. Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean that your blog is open for anyone unauthorized. Access still requires your username and password. This will also work with private blogs.

We hope your like our new service and as always we’re happy to hear your feedback!
your friendly feedfabrik team

First we need paper. A lot of paper. The paper comes in huge rolls, essentially like giant toilet paper rolls. Just a bit heavier. The folks on the shop floor need a special forklift to actually move these rolls around and insert them into the printing machine. You don’t want them roll over your feet!

The paper is pulled from the roll by a paper feeding device. The feeder makes sure that there is a constant paper flow for the printing machine and that the paper never gets stuck – or worse – gets torn.

Next in line is the actual printer. Here you can see a device from Oce that is really top-notch for black/white printing. The machine prints several pages next to each other on the running paper, so some smart software first needs to layout all the sheets and then needs to control the later cutting and sorting stages so that it all fits together.

Depending on the climatic situation in the print shop, the paper needs to be kept at a higher humidity, so that it stays nice and flat. This is what the next machine is doing. If you keep the full room climatized well enough, you could do without that box. On the right, you can see the output from the printer with three pages laid out next to each other on the paper.

Now the paper is fed into the cutter. The cutter needs to be very precise in order to keep all pages in the final book well aligned. That’s why it needs special marks printed along the content of a page to adjust the cuttings down to a fraction of a millimeter. In the finished book, you won’t see these marks anymore as they’re cut away.

In the end, a sorter needs to grab all the different pages, collect them and put them together in the right order. They’re then compiled into need little piles, each one with a stack of individual books. All this happens at pretty high speed without anyone touching the stuff. The process obviously needs to be highly industrialized as otherwise we wouldn’t be able to offer our super low prices for prints of 1 copy only.

Nevertheless, a bit of manual labour is required in the end. The book blocks are taken one by one and fed into the binding machine. This machine automatically grabs the right covers and binds them to the inside of the books. The output on the other side is actually your book.

Of course, everything happens to the highest quality standards. Should you ever have a complaint about your book, please get in touch with us and we try to sort it out.

Your friendly feedfabrik team

Before, we would always print date and author of a post just below the post heading. This is very similar to what most blogs do online and we simply copied that look. With the new options, you can switch this information on and off to your liking. You can find the selection on the book desk inside the application. Below, we’ve put a few examples together to show you the effect.

This is the old style showing author and date on each post.

This is the layout if you select to show only the author.

This is the layout if you select to show only the date.

And finally, you can also hide both, author and date.

This should basically cover it. If you have any further suggestions or ideas about layout options, please let us know via the feedback tab on the right, by posting a comment below or by directly writing to us.

your friendly feedfabrik team

We only offered the blog to book conversion for VOX during the last two weeks after we had learnt that VOX would shut down. Not much time to get a smooth service running, not much time to serve all the bloggers interested in book creation. Apologies for the hickups that some of you experienced, but we investigated every issue with each individual blogger who contacted us – and in the end we think we found a solution for everyone. Thank you for your orders! We enjoyed working on your books. They’re all in print now and shortly on the way to you.

Quite a few people think of preserving their writings only when they’re faced with the loss of their work. The funny thing is that all this hype about cloud storage of data, social media platforms and online user generated content makes us believe that our creations are safe for ever. But that’s not true. Content loss in the electronic world can happen quite easily. Your harddrive can crash and take years of pictures into a black hole. Platforms like VOX change strategies and switch off their content. Our goal remains to help users take back control of their content and take it back into the real world.

your friendly feedfabrik team

Please let us know if you’re happy with the layout of your book or if you would like to see changes or improvements. If you don’t like what we made of your tables, please go to the support section and send us a short note!

your feedfabrik team

Thanks!
your feedfabrik team

The print-proof PDF is always free and you can download that inside bookfabrik in any case!

If you ordered the PDF already and now come back to buy a printed book,  you can request a refund for the PDF. Simply get in touch with our friendly support.

You currently have a choice of two covers showing your blog title and your name. On the back, the abstract / description of your blog will be printed.

The cover option is still a bit unstable, i.e. sometimes you will see a grey page only instead of a cover. Please bear with us while we tune it further and get it straight. The problem is known.

If you have any ideas or suggestions for new covers, we’re happy to hear from you

your feedfabrik team

Please accept our apologies for the downtime.

We’ve heard you! Today, we released a new layout option on bookfabrik that allows you to toggle an option for the layout of URLs. If you like, your blogbook will convert all links from your blog to footnotes showing the URLs. However, as the VOX platform will be switched off soon, links leading to VOX won’t make much sense anymore. So you can also disable this option in order to hide all the links. No footnotes will be shown in this case.

To keep things simple, the switch works “globally”, i.e. you can switch the feature on or off for the whole blog, not for individual chapters or links. Head over to bookfabrik and give it a try.

This is obviously very annoying, especially for the VOX users who don’t have much time left to save their blogs to books.

We’re working on hard to stabilize the situation.

If you experience any other stuff that stops you from producing your blogbook, please let us know via our support system.

• [solved] There was a short downtime today during the server move.
• [solved] The title of the book cover is now missing for the blogbooks.
• [solved] The date selection for the blog posts does not go earlier than 1 January 2010

As this is still a beta-service, there are a number of other things we need to improve as well. We’re pretty much aware of that and we’re working hard to get things fixed and stable. One important request is the integration with WordPress – and this is on the top of our agenda.

Please send us your thoughts and ideas. If anythings doesn’t work as expected, please let us know via the feedback tab on the right.

Your feedfabrik team

…read more in blogger-world.de

Bookfabrik should now be able to automatically convert your VOX blog to a nice printed book. You can also download the PDF version of the book or the actual print-ready proof file (in PDF as well). The book will feature your full blog including all the pictures – even if they are marked as private. Of course, you will need to login with your user credentials to allow us to collect your content. The process itself is very straight forward and the app will create your book automatically right after login. You can then tweak the layout a bit before your order or download.

Please keep in mind that Bookfabrik is still in beta and some things might look different than you expect – or might not work at all. If you find any bugs, please help us by letting us know by email to info @ feedfabrik.com. The same is true for feature requests and suggestions!

If things don’t work speedy, that is because of the Amazon Cloud server we’re using right now. Coming next week we plan to move to a bigger server which should make things much faster.

Enjoy,
your feedfabrik team

WordPress Rolls Out Subscriptions, a Simplified RSS Feature: http://mashable.com/2010/09/10/wordpress-subscriptions/

Development is almost finished and you can expect VOX to work with Feedfabrik starting this weekend.

We hope this is at least some good news in face of the switch-off.
your feedfabrik team

How many facebook friends have you got? Share your #birthday #calendar with us and win an Ipod: promotion@feedfabrik.com

VOX gives its users the option to migrate the content to TypePad and move the photos and videos to Flickr. There is also an option to export the blog to WordPress. Of course, that’s not the same (and a big hassle it is, too).

It’s so bad, I started working with Geocities 8 years ago with my first site.What a history of the internet

To some of you, this might even look like a déja vu. Almost exactly a year ago, Geocities closed its doors. While not being a blog platform, it still was a big and once leading content site with a wide variety of pages. In 2008, some sources estimated Geocities to feature 23m pages in total! Just like with VOX, the Geocities users were pretty much left in the dark and all the protest on the net didn’t help at all.

Earlier the same year, another popular site closed down: Google Notebook. While Notebook allowed users to keep their content online, it is no longer developed and does not accept any new users – which renders its collaboration functionality quite useless.

Bottom line is that your online content is not as secure and permanent as you might have hoped. The convenience of using a proprietary blog platform run by a commercial company comes with the risk of loosing everything. Companies have to develop their business plans further, activities change over time.

That is one reason why we believe that printing your blog is a great way to secure your personal memories. There is nothing like a book on the shelf when it comes to keeping your writings safe. Have a look at the Feedfabrik Vision to read more about this.

Unfortunately, VOX doesn’t seem to offer a public API that would allow us to retrieve your data easily for blog printing. Otherwise, we would have loved to help you out by extending our BookFabrik to VOX, giving you the opportunity to print your stuff before it disappears. If anyone reading this has any deeper insights on a VOX API (e.g. some MetaWeblog access), please let us know via the comments or by direct email.

your Feedfabrik team

When you now connect with the app at PictureFabrik you will see a more detailed permissions box popping up from Facebook. Please read the requested data access carefully and confirm (if you agree). We will not store your data and only use it to produce the birthday poster. If you are unsure, please read our privacy policy.

If your friends on facebook have very restrictive settings themselves, you might find that you cannot access their birthdates and thus we cannot access their birthdates for you. On the birthday poster, this means that we cannot place your friends on the right date. Instead, we’ll show their picture at the bottom of the calendar, just after the end of the year.

Let us know if this works out for you!
your feedfabrik team

• Improved handling of images from other sources than blogspot. Flickr, Picasa and many other platforms should now be feeding your pictures correctly into your printed blogbook.
• Improved layouting if blog posts. We changed the way page breaking works to give a better look
• Improved support of international characters. We often get asked for support beyond the standard English alphabet and hope to cover a very wide range from French accents to Icelandic thorn characters correctly. Sorry, no Arabic or Japanese yet.
• Massive speed-up of layout process. The blog data loads faster, images load faster, the cover generates much quicker, the layout process is speedier. Overall, you should have a much better experience (and less time for a coffee, sorry).
• More stability of the service. Some big blogs brought down our servers in the past. That should not happen anymore. If you see an error, please let us know so that we can fix it.
• Many other details have been fixed, improved, changed to the better (we hope).

Having said that, please keep in mind that this is still a beta service. The shop is still closed for buying actual books as we plan to migrate to bigger servers this week but it should open next week so stay tuned!

…read more in upload-magazin

…read more.

Hopefully, this will become a place where we can share our thoughts with you and also enter into a discussion. We have quite a few ideas in store, but please feel free to comment, challenge and push is in any direction you feel is important. We will also write about the development of our service and the latest feature releases will be announced here.

Any new blog entry is also announced on twitter @feedfabrik

Hope to see you around,
your team at feedfabrik