(…if that’s what you really want to do)

Using Feedjournal bloggers can essentially pdf their content by putting the feed for their posts into the site’s generator. The result is the blog laid out in a newspaper style, complete with headlines and bylines, you can even make a masthead if you so wish.

Dave Lee has tried it out on his blog and I have to agree with him that I’m not really sure what the point is. The idea of taking a functional online publishing platform and shoehorning it into a ‘traditional media’ format seems counterproductive.

Plus it doesn’t really make longer posts more user-friendly, as, having tried it out on our feed, a long enough post will take up a whole page and find its way to the front of the ‘paper’.

On the other hand the service could be a way for newsletter-style publishers to better link their print handouts with content online. Being able to repackage a blog’s content so quickly could encourage these kind of operations to devote more time to what they do online without neglecting their print operations.

For e-paper fans, however, the forthcoming release of a FeedJournal service for readers, allowing users to select the feeds that make up the pdf’s content, might be more appealing.