I have really enjoyed reading through Initiative One recently. It’s a great little blog that unfortunately seems to have been inactive since September of 2010. Even when it was active, it was not very high volume (38 posts 2008 – 2010), but just about everything is worth reading. It has a wonderful historical perspective on OD&D; I read it from cover to cover.
(Aside: I’ve been pondering writing a scraper script that would transform Blogger blogs into epub format documents to make it easier to read them chronologically and offline. There are so many high-quality OSR blogs to catch up on, but Blogger does not make it very convenient to read blogs in that way.)
Did you ever make that scraper script?
@Charles
No, I haven’t yet, but I still think it would be useful.
Hacked this together.
https://code.google.com/p/blogger-scraper/source/browse/
Basically, cd into a directory to store the downloaded copy, run ‘python [url-of-oldest-post] [name-of-local-file]’ and this script will merrily copy all of the blog posts into one long, simple HTML file which should be good for making ebooks from. I don’t really know anything about making ebooks, but this is a pretty basic format.
Titles and bodies have their own divs, and titles are h3’s.
Images are downloaded and stored locally, and re-linked in the file.
Fair warning: I hacked this together in about half an hour, it’s not too pretty, and it doesn’t do any exception handling. Only works on Blogger blogs.
Awesome.
Here’s an easy way to make an epub file out of an html file at the command line:
ebook-convert input.html output.epub –preserve-cover-aspect-ratio –output-profile ipad –cover cover.jpg
ebook-convert is part of the Calibre package. Input and output files should be renamed to fit your situation. All the flags after them are optional, but I found them useful.
Sorry for the thread necromancy, but I couldn’t resist commenting that I’ve also developed a similar utility; mine scrapes Blogger or WordPress blogs and replays them into an Atom feed so that you can gradually process the backlog through your feed reader of choice. I happened to find this post by doing just that with Necropraxis, which also happens to be the main reason I added WordPress support.
The utility can be found here: https://github.com/steadmon/blog-replay