Last week I mentioned a couple of interviews that had tweaked my interest in a solution for automatically creating a printed "newspaper" of individual blog postings that I wanted to devote more time to. Clint Lalonde left a comment suggesting FeedJournal, so I went to take a peek, and it's almost perfect for what I want to do. FeedJournal allows you to subscribe to any RSS feed(s) and then spits out a nicely formatted PDF for you to read. You can specify the number of columns and whether it's justified or not - looks pretty good. But I didn't want to subscribe to entire feeds - just individual posts. Well, the tool's author suggests subscribing to a specific tag within Google Reader; any other filtering mechanism should work as well. Last step for me though is that the RSS reader I use on my iPhone doesn't allow me to re-tag articles, so I decided to just grab the feed for my shared items, which I then fed to FeedJournal and voila!
Except I don't want to have to visit FeedJournal each time I want to generate my "newspaper", and FeedJournal doesn't have any scheduling options. Well, they do with a different version of the product that costs $59/month.
So I found this comparison of FeedJournal of Tabbloid, an HP project (isn't that brilliant for a printer company?) Does the same thing as FeedJournal, though with fewer options for customization. But it allows me to schedule delivery of the PDF created by the feed I gave them. I just received the first delivery, so it seems to work well! oops, except it has all the items in the feed, not just the most recent. No problem, I just printed the first few pages, and perhaps the next delivery will only include new stuff.
I'm a happy reader!