Alas! (BookSmart, the update)

[azurelunatic]

That news post link is, again: http://news.livejournal.com/114780.html

Once you have the program downloaded, start a new book. In the layout, select Blog to Book.

It will download 500 entries. These are the first 500 entries you posted, in posting order rather than chronological order. It doesn't do comments. I see no way to make it skip some entries and start slurping the next 500 entries.

Sadly, this means that it is completely unusable for me, but more power to you if it works for you!

Comments

[shiv5468.livejournal.com]

No point without the comments. Otherwise it's all narcissistic innit?

It's the others being here that makes LJ work.

[azurelunatic]

I think this is aimed a little more at Bloggers Who Do A Column than it is the communal nature of many LJs.

Comments are a not-right-now for LJ; it'll grab comments from some other platforms.

[lady-angelina.livejournal.com]

Awwww, snap. =(

Ah well.

[hotarunokokoro.livejournal.com]

Dang it! Well thanks for trying anyway. Maybe I will download my entries anyway.

[azurelunatic]

And, on the bright side, they may well upgrade the client so it works for Very Large Journals.

[marta.livejournal.com]

I posted this over in news but figured over here would be good too!

I've received information that there is a limit of 440 pages for the book (that's not 440 entries, but however many entries would make up 440 pages), but that you should be able to download your entire journal and select the 440 pages you would like - so theoretically you could make multiple volumes.

If it's not working correctly for you, Blurb's technical support should be able to look into it and help troubleshoot.

[azurelunatic]

♥

[norabombay.livejournal.com]

eh. It leaves me with oh, 3900 entries that won't fit. Oops.

[azurelunatic]

Looks like it's supposed to be able to take the whole LJ. I've got a tech support request in.

I'm starting to feel sorry for support

[foxfirefey]

Other issues:

* Only downloads 311 for me. I wondered if that's because it is only doing public posts or something, but no. There's no distinction of public/friended/private that I can see and they include them all and you can't choose which. And you can't figure it out from the choose entries.
* Choose entries is clunky, with a fixed window size that doesn't even make efficient use of the space inside it, so I can only see nine entries listed at once.
* And in that choose entries "category" seems to be the first-by-alphabet tag used on that entry, making it erratic and nearly useless.
* The default page layout is VERY space inefficient. So far, I've been unable to get multiple pages to change layout at once, either. Additionally, I so far have not been able to find a way to get more than one entry on a page, although I didn't try very long. This is important because even with only 311 entries, due to the space inefficient layout, I went over the max of 440 pages.
* I've actually managed to crash the program once.

Re: I'm starting to feel sorry for support

[azurelunatic]

Happily for LJ support, issues with the program are being handled by the other guys.

Re: I'm starting to feel sorry for support

[foxfirefey]

Ah, so I imagine they have the support privs to do that then and you guys just have to move it to their section maybe?

Re: I'm starting to feel sorry for support

[azurelunatic]

I'm not yet sure what Support is going to be doing with these requests, perhaps referring to their support, who are at http://www.blurb.com/help/technical_support.

Re: I'm starting to feel sorry for support

[foxfirefey]

Although I still think a lot of confusion and wasted effort could be saved if they actually gave some decent info on limitations in the news post itself.

Re: I'm starting to feel sorry for support

[azurelunatic]

I don't know if it was tested with the amount of enthusiastic banging that the average LJ support frontliner would consider sufficient (comparable to DW closed beta tester, I think). marta made inquiries, and some of the things I ran into that I thought were limits aren't so.

Re: I'm starting to feel sorry for support

[foxfirefey]

I'm sure they know there's no comment support there, though, and that'd be a sentence to add.

[lacey]

Oh, I hope they get this fixed; I was so looking forward to finally getting a book of my Life's Work, or at least the first volume.

[foxfirefey]

Have you tried LJBook in combo with Lulu?

[lacey]

Not yet, was hoping to have a little easier/faster solution before doing that, but I think I might have to.

Also, I need to update my LJ backup. My previous one is a little dated now.