Dowbrigade News – Now on CD

Another
of the topics of interest that came up on Thursday night, and which was
driven home in dramatic fashion mere hours later by the bollocks in the
Berkman server, was the precarious nature of digital archives, and the
worries that bloggers have about permanence of their work and writing.

Dave said that was the kind of problem he liked, because he could sit
down in a few hours and come up with a solution.  We don’t know
what he had in mind, but we have given some thought to the problem and
concluded that what we need is an easy way to convert a month’s worth
of the Dowbrigade News into a PDF. Burn 12 monthly PDFs onto a CD and
you have a fairly stable, relatively permanent record of one year’s worth
of your Blog.

It could be stored and used as a backup or archive. Good quality
CDs are supposed to last up to 100 years. It could also be given as a
gift or stocking stuffer, sent to people who
live
in isolated
off-line backwaters or read on airplanes.  For certain more stylish
and less topical blogs, it may be a superior mode of distribution.

Since we use OS X, it is simple to create a great-looking PDF
by using the built-in "create pdf" option in the print dialog box .If
only Manila had an option to display a whole month of posts at a time,
it would be very useful for creating pdf archives.

We currently try to do this once a week, usually on Sundays, but since
it is hard for the Dowbrigade to remember where he parked his car from
day to day, let alone something that is supposed to happen once a week,
and because when we are posting at a robust rate we can only display
about
four days
at
a
time,
our record
contains
many
gaps.

An easy format for storage and archiving as well as non-networked distribution.