The Electric Journal of Adel Gabot

As a writer, I've lost lots of work from the recent and the distant past for a number of reasons, among them sloth and neglect, carelessness, technical glitches, crashed drives and mold and fungus on floppy disks. So one of my great fears nowadays is not having control over the existence of my work (regardless if the work is execrable or excellent or anywhere in-between), particularly aggregated entries on a blog like this one; if the site folds or my account get screwed up, it's gone. Hey, it's not literature, but I'd still like to keep a copy of it.

Sure, I have saved per-entry files in XJournal (which is an offline blogging client - I've lost more than one entry to a crashed browser and I learned my lesson), but the loss of your blog as a whole is a scary idea. Been keeping this LiveJournal blog for going on three years now and I hate that I can't keep any decent archive of it.

Until now. Enter LJ Book.

LJ Book is a free online service that creates a PDF book out of your LiveJournal blog. Your. Entire. Blog. Complete with pictures, links (footnoted only, but let's not quibble), comments, moods, music and everything else. You have to tweak your settings and convert a few things around first for compatibility with their system, but it's worth the few minutes. And when everything is set, it takes about 3 to 5 minutes to be made into a PDF, which they keep for download for about an hour on their site.

Now you can print it out, email it or post it online to be read by browsers or PDF readers. (If you want, you can actually have it physically printed by them, but I'm not that insecure.) The best thing is you can finally keep your blog in a safe place.

You can preset the format, and even the range of entries you want to archive, and which parts. Granted, it just maintains the most basic of layouts, but that's not the important thing. You can have it laid out by a graphic whiz later if you're that vain.

And, believe it or not, it's free. (Well, they solicit donations, and I've never come across a service that deserves it as much as this one.) You can archive periodically, or more often if you're paranoid and insecure. It's been around since a month before i started blogging in LJ, and I just found out about it now. Dang. But better late than never.

So this is fantastic, if belated news, for this LJ blogger. And for my other LJ friends out there who haven't yet heard of this, archive now. You know you want to.