Blurb BookSmart® gives you the ability to create blog books from blogs on Blogger, Live Journal, Typepad, and WordPress.com. However, currently it doesn’t work with a self-hosted WordPress blog, i.e., one on your own domain. While we work on a fix to this, there’s an easy workaround that can actually help make the editing process easier – something I discovered while making a blog book from our #camerathursdays posts on blog.blurb.com. And it takes about five minutes.
Step 1: Export your posts
First go to your blog admin panel and select “Export” under the “Tools” menu. Here’s where you have a chance to select the content you’ll want to export. This can make creating your book easier down the road because you’ll only import certain content. I chose a specific category I wanted to import. ↓
Step 2: Create a WordPress.com blog
Now that you’ve exported your posts and they’re on your computer, it’s time to find them a temporary home on WordPress.com. Creating an account is free and easy. Keep that password handy – you’ll need it in BookSmart. ↓
Step 3: Import your posts
Go into the admin panel on your new wordpress.com blog and select “Import” under “Tools.” This should look pretty familiar. Select WordPress as your import source ↓
Then upload your exported posts. ↓
Step 4: Slurp blog into BookSmart
Now, just fire up BookSmart, select a book size, choose a blog book, and enter your WordPress.com login credentials. Since you already chose which blog posts you wanted to export, you’ll only get the posts you need. Need more help slurping your blog? We have a video on that. ↓
14 Comments
Hi!
Thanks for this tip. I have converted my wordpress blog into a new one using the instructions above. It worked well and I have a new blog. BUT when trying to put the blog into a book, booksmart shows me no entries – so it looks empty….any suggestions???
Hey Mike,
I’m sorry, I’m not sure why that would be. It could just be that you didn’t click some check box. Contact our Support Team at the link below and they can help you out: http://blur.by/JMrmUH
best
Kent
I’m having the same problem. Booksmart finds the blog but the entries are blank. My blog already was on wordpress.com but I followed these steps to create a test blog just to see if that would fix the problem. But it didn’t. Just want to confirm that “xxxx”.wordpress.com” should be able to be slurped, right? Would really like to use this feature.
Hey Amy,
It worked for us, and our blog was in the same format “xxx”.wordpress.com. Are you able to get the posts into wordpress.com correctly, or is the problem happening in BookSmart? We only imported about 20 or so posts – it’s possible that bigger blogs could hang up.
best
Kent
Your related post no.3″ Blurb’s New Blog to Book program” when clicked just reveals a “Not found” page.
Hey Roger, We’ve fixed that link. However, it’s a very old, and out-of-date post, back when we were just testing out our blog to book program. So stick with what we have here, as well as the other related links in the list.
thank you so much! This worked very well!!!! Super.
Hey Heather,
Fantastic! So glad to hear that. It’s nice seeing all that screen work transformed into paper, isn’t it?
Kent
So, I get to the point of slurping – hit continue (list of blogs chosen). Up comes the import photos page. I started with a lot of material – I’m used to doing 400 page books with you guys. Photos were imported. Then waited for another two hours – while nothing happened. Nada. Still stuck on the Slurp! page while the booksmart main page shows minimal population – mostly just the form with a few titles. So I waiting an extra hour and ended up with an error message? Or maybe a time-out message – saying not to worry, that my work was saved and I just had to log-in again. But when I logged in, there had been nothing saved.
This morning, I tried again with less than half the material, imported 905 photos (I’m image heavy), and I’m still sitting here with nothing going on. How much material is too much? What happens after the import is complete – before the Slurp window actually DOES something? I want to preserve my material, but if this thing can only handle 150 pages at a time, I won’t be able to afford to use this service – which is really disappointing. I mean, I’m already having to import everything in to WP.com, which I did faithfully, following these instructions. But now, Booksmart doesn’t seem to work????
Okay. Made sure I had the newest version of Booksmart and cut down the material to many fewer entries. And finally, I got something going. May I ask you, with your experience, about some of the weird things I’m running into?
1) The text coming from WordPress comes in without spaces between paragraphs. This has to have something to do with the way WP sets up its HTML, right? Have you had to go in and make page breaks at the end of each paragraph?
2) Sometimes the comments get slurped all in a nice flow. Sometimes the comments each get assigned a page – one page for one comment. Any clue as to why it works well sometimes and sometimes not?
3) Now that, idiot as I am, I’ve invested an hour or so making page breaks, deleting pages, copy-and-pasting comments – I end up with not many pages in the book. I want LOTS of pages in the book. Is it possible to slurp MORE posts into this book? I don’t see anywhere on the site where anybody’s taught us any of this stuff. And this process is not the magic Ta-DA!! process I hoped it would be. Worth it, but not at all a slam dunk.
Hey Kristen,
Sounds like you’ve done a lot of work on this. Here are my best answers:
1) While WordPress is great, it can create some messy code, which will translate into messy layouts. Unfortunately, hand-editing the layout is your best bet.
2) Unfortunately, I’m not sure why it treats some comments differently.
3) Yes, you can import more blogs. On the left-hand panel above your posts is a button that says “import blogs.”
I’m hoping we can add some improvements to make the whole process more “Ta Da.” Thanks for sticking with it.
best
Kent
Hey Kristen,
I’m sorry you’re having trouble with it. At this point, you should contact our Support Team. They can help you through the process:
http://blur.by/Teoa6W
best
Kent
My mistake — I found the blog to book choice on the next screen.
But here’s my new question…
when importing /slurping from a wordpress.com site — it doesn’t import images that are in wordpress galleries. The only images that get imported are those that are directly placed in the blog post.
This is a problem — is there a workaround or other solution? I have almost 600 posts and it would be too much work to update every post manually.
Thanks,
Hey David,
I’m not sure if there is a way, but our Support Team may have an answer for you – give them a try: http://blur.by/YdcjqC
best
Kent
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