Man Is The Media.
RSS to PDF Converters Showdown: FeedJournal vs. Tabbloid
January 8th, 2009 by Martin
Blogging is publishing, right? But it never really achieves that print-and-ink feeling, right? Wrong.
Well, sort of. I’ve been playing with two blog-to-PDF services (actually RSS-to-PDF), as it’s a nice thing to compile your precious writings once in a while. You can email it to your Mom who doesn’t get blogging, or print it to a friend going backpacking somewhere without WiFi. Or, like me, just repost it to an online publishing site near you.
I’ve been trying out two services, FeedJournal and Tabbloid. They’re equally easy to use and within minutes you’ll get your PDF with your blog layouted as a newspaper (or tabloid as it were). The idea is that you can get your favorite blogs emailed regularly as a PDF, but I just used it to collect, reformat and repost my writing this once. I’d prefer Google Reader any day, but the choice is yours.
FeedJournal gets the newspaper feeling right
I tried this service a while back, but they had problems dealing with images in posts back then. But now it works like a charm. Take a look (embedded with Issuu; embedding is not supported by any of the services):
Upside: It actually looks like a newspaper, complete with ‘continued from page X’ wrapping, different page layouts, and images. Neat. I should add that the fonts, font sizes and much more can be changed, if you go Gold. The price tag is $ 59 and in my ears that sounds like a whole lot of cash, unless you really have specific use for it (hmm, not sure I can think of what that might be, as most blogs already are served as email too via Feedburner and Nourish).
Downside: Links are not preserved, guess they want me to print this anyway. Rich media is not preserved. I can see why, but still it would be a killer feature once PDFs starts supporting that generally. A workaround could have been an image of whatever video or widget was there, but I can imagine that would be a problem, just like it is with most feed readers. Also, multiple images are grouped on some pages, which makes it hard to see what they might relate to in the text.
Tabbloid gets the links right, almost
The Tabbloid design is pretty straight forward, using the same two-column design on every page. A bit dull, but ok for sharing that precious knowledge. Check it out (using a different Issuu skin just for fun):
Upside: Links are active, although not highlighted.
Downside: Same rich media problem as FeedJournal. Boring layout.
While this in no way is a conclusive review, it should give you a feel of the two services. I like them both. They are free and fun, and no matter if you print the output or not, it gives you a different view of the blog feeds you’ve entered.
While I would never subscribe to a blog this way, I think services like this has more value in collecting blog posts like I did above. Sometimes it’s nice to just to go oldschool, although with a twist. Just imagine how long it would take to convert your blog into a document like this? It would take ages and although these services aren’t perfect (e.g. in relation to links and rich media), it’s pretty darn well done in the few minutes it took. For this use only, I prefer FeedJournal for their better layout. It would be immensely cool, however, if the output was in an editable format, so I could continue editing it.
An online alternative
Also check out Feed Chronicle, which does basically the same, except online only: Using feeds to form a newspaper-like page. Sort of like Huffington Post, but with no editors, except yourself who can choose which feeds to read. Downside is that you can’t just see your own feed (although you can suggest one), but why would you want to do that anyway? (if not for purely narcissistic reasons such as those underlined above…). Here’s a screenshot to give you an idea (I could imagine the source providers at some point would want in on any ad revenue generated):
[...] blog, but I’m sure it’s just coincidental: A while ago I wrote about similar services FeedJournal and Tabbloid and called for a somewhat different model: Using technology to repackage, edit, and re-distribute [...]