blog to book project

disclaimer: this entry is about programming. (sorry! but I get the feeling most of my blog readers are probably not too scared of technical things anyway...)

Although I've mainly been a Java programmer until this point, my company's needed some help making campaigns and such for its game websites, and these are all done with PHP. Note: if you know Java, besides the inevitable syntax mix ups for the first few days, php is pretty much a piece of cake. (ok, except for debugging which can be quite painful, forcing even... (gasp) medieval print statements to see what your darn variables are, if you don't have the right setup. which I do not.

So anyways, as a happy side effect I have been getting downright comfortable with PHP. And this opens a lot of doors for the hobbyist programmer, as many APIs (including Google, and probably Facebook...) are interfacable wih PHP. Which means, in a word... Apps! With sufficient time and energy, you can probably make something pretty neat and hook it up to your favorite Web2.0 site.

Which is why I want to do one! Ok... I don't have that much time or energy as it is mostly going to reading every single English book in the hikarigaoka public library. ;) But I can dream....

Ladies and gentlemen, here is my idea and how to do it. (drumroll please): Blog to PDF! I really want an application that will make my blog into a book. I think the best way to do i would be to make a PDF, and then send it to Lulu or some other such self-publishing site.

1. to slurp in all of a person's blog info, help them choose entries, and store, you need this: http://code.google.com/apis/blogger/docs/1.0/developers_guide_php.html

2. To write the book out to pdf format you need this: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/generate-pdfs-php/

So now, dear reader, you know how (in theory) to make the application I want. Please let me know when you're done, as I will be much to busy to write it myself, seeing as how the King of Torts is due back in a few days. ;)