A lot of teachers recently, have been making online newspapers. I wrote about 2 services here. However, what if you’d like to print your blog and read offline or just send a pdf around for others to use?

Using an RSS feed and converting to PDF is an option. If you aren’t too familiar with RSS, see this Common Craft video

I’ve written about the rss to pdf newsletter “rinser” that I have been making/toying with previously. I really do have to go back to it and do some work. It works but needs to accept more data from each rss and also allow for more customization.

Today, I played around with another option. Feed Journal. It does a pretty handy job. Go here and get an example. Here’s the example I produced in a few seconds and which they sent by email. TEFListBlogpdf

The links are active and it is attractive. However, to have longer length or your own logo/header – you’ll have to pay their steep $49/mo (or wait for me to get my act together with the free one!).

So I went to my account and tried to see how much progress they’ve done on the free version since I last dropped in on them a year ago. Here’s what they did with this blog. This Blog as a Newspaper by feed journal

It does offer more options of pdfing images and many more items in the RSS (up to 50). Further, it does allow you to print many standard feeds easily (like Nat. Geographic / The Economist – two I do print out and then drink my coffee and read). Just get the RSS feed of these online sites and put it in, then select and print with Feed Journal.

Overall though, the standard journal is messy and unattractive. It will need to be improved. I’ll try in the meantime to improve my own!