Oh dear, that’s really not good. Podzy seems to be a bit unhappy about what’s going on with people using his guides to make money. Podz has spends HOURS on the forums helping people out whenever he can. He’s also responsible for both writing up and hosting the WP guides, which for many people (myself included) have been an invaluable resourse of information. I just tried to access the things, and got my IP banned as he’s password protected the guides. For example when I was moving my host over the guy (and macmanx) both came to reassure me that everything was going to be ok, and that I wasn’t going to loose all my posts.

As far as I can tell a certain Larry on the forums said he was going to make a WordPress manual, which he was going to write from scratch. Yeah well if you need information about the ins and outs of WordPress you either check the Codex or the Forums or the Manuals. Guess who’s name comes across the board on all these things? Yup Podz. So understandably the man is a bit miffed, that’s not how this particular community has worked so far.

So it took me all of 10 seconds, seriously, to offer to help out Podz make an offical book of sorts using his pages already. It would be a long hard road, but one that’s ultimately pretty gratifying. Ahh, but I’m not a publisher you say? No, I’m not but I’ve got CafePress at my fingertips if I want. He’s decided not to help anymore, which seems a bit rash, hopefully he’ll reconsider. My offer to pull the book together still stands, he can sort out the content of the book and the cafepress site ^_^.

What’s CafePress you ask? Well it’s a way for anyone to set up a store online selling personalised merchandise revolving around whatever it is they’re website is about. This has beenmainly T-shirts, mugs, etc. Recently (i.e 8 months ago) they added books in there as well. They come in a different range of bindings (saddle-stitch, ring binder and perfect bound), have a flat rate per type and then additional cost per page. Soo the idea is you have to price a 100 page perfect bound book at $10, because that’s how much they’re charging, and then you add whatever you want as a mark-up.

I’ve toyed around with the idea a lot, but it only allows black and white content. That’s why I personally find it slightly limiting for my comic book work, however I might actually use it for a sketchbook. As time goes by I’m collecting more and more sketches.

Oh sure they’re not the cheapest thing in the world, and it’s not as easy to have a look at what you’re getting before you buy it, but it’s one method. In that thread I was pointed to another service, which seems like a good idea. It’s called BlogBinders and converts your blog into a book in the same 3 formats as provided by CafePress.

From my point of view, I think it would be great to collect my posts as a book for myself. Hey I might be online a lot but I’m a complete book junkie. I’ve only started thinking about this, but I’d need to edit everything to show the links in full, and I’d probably have to delete or not include a few of the earlier posts as they were pretty rubbish (or do I include them to see how rubbish they actually where?).