[1]skip to main content [2] [logo] • [3] Archives • [4] Works • [5] About • [6] More... The Archivist In Me Turned This Blog Into a Book 5 June 2026 Four years ago, in the article [7]What Happens To My Digital Identity When I Die?, I wrote the following prophetic words: […] Which gets me back to this website. My intentions are to someday publish its contents in the form of a book, which can also be stored at the KBR [Royal Library of Belgium]. This allows the people dear to me to still have access to the silly stuff I write here. Two years later, I claimed that [8]Good Blogging Habits Yield a Book Each Year of more than 80k words. That means compiling a hefty tome to compress all these years of productive blogging into a single physical volume might be a bit more challenging than I initially anticipated. Yet not impossible. So the last months, I’ve kept myself busy by doing just that: turning this blog into a book! [9] [pages] The book flipped open on the blog post 'Three Little GameCube Mods' from 05 December 2021. This was a special experiment with a high probability of failure as I wasn’t sure how it would turn out. What should a Brain Baking book look like compared to browsing this website? How should it feel to flip through the pages? Will I be able to squeeze everything in there (nope)? Do I want to publish this publicly or just generate a .pdf, send it to the presses just for myself and call it a day? And if so, which service to use, as the past ones I’ve relied on all showed their shortcomings? Brain Baking DX Luckily, it turned out all right. I call it Brain Baking DX: Blog Archives 2016 - 2026 and it is [10]available at Amazon under ISBN-13 number 979-8197112897. My first attempt yielded more than 500 pages and I couldn’t find a publishing service that was eager to print something like that for less than €100. At Amazon, the book costs… €15. And it’s globally available, should you be crazy enough to want a copy. Be warned, though: the book is mostly unedited, I created this mainly for myself. I sent out a few copies to friends but have no intention of setting up a marketing campaign let alone making money off of it. I intentionally set the price low and receive €0.5 for every sale. Please do not buy this just to support me. So why a book? As mentioned before, I want my writing to be a bit more permanent than the fleeting medium called the internet. What happens when my VPS is blown up, my backups burned away, and my motivation to restore all this along with it? In Belgium every author of “proper” books (this is debatable nowadays… Is Brain Baking DX a proper book?) is legally obliged to deposit two copies to the Royal Library in Brussels, where the books disappear into the winding depths of the archive deep below the capital. Plus, I like books. I like flipping through this one and rediscovering old writings: it feels very different than clicking through the online archive. Also, since I like to add photos in my blog posts to help shape the atmosphere, preserving these mostly personal photos in the book makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside when I flip through the book and look at them. Some of these photos are snapshots of my life as a kid, my old and new desktop setup, destinations I once biked to, etc. It’s a nice memento to have these included. Why Brain Baking DX? What’s up with that? Most readers of this blog know that I grew up with a Game Boy and became a big retro gaming nut(case) because of it. The black DX cartridge editions transformed their original Game Boy release into the wonderful world of colours: black carts work with the original Game Boy and the then new Game Boy Color. DX was simply the “DeluXe” treatment to your beloved Link’s Awakening or Tetris. Funny, as Brain Baking DX might be called anything but deluxe: financial constraints prevent me from publishing this book in full colour mode and space constraints prevent me from simply dumping everything that I’ve ever written in here. Perhaps both are for the better. Still, in a way, a printed edition of ten years worth of Brain Baking blog posts can certainly be called deluxe. Compiling the book My method for compiling the book wasn’t as simple as throwing every Markdown article source file at Pandoc to compile a single .pdf. I didn’t want to preserve everything I post here: it had to be a deliberate, curated selection. Things I didn’t want in there include: • Research and topics regarding creativity & bread baking: I have other published books that delve into this. • Monthly link sharing posts and other posts that are mainly lists or links. • Technical posts on programming, coding, Hugo tips, etc. • Design mistake posts. • Overly negative posts. Anything that has the word “AI” in it (except my more elaborate commentary). • Too short posts to be worthwhile printing. • Too photo/screenshot intensive posts to be worthwhile printing. After proceeding to make a first selection, I categorised these into major themes that became the parts of the book: parenting, journaling & writing, work, the web, technology, retro, video and board games, life & philosophy, food & cooking, and living in Belgium. Then I employed my usual Markdown/Pandoc /TeX magic and inspected the results. [11] [books-stac] The front cover of Brain Baking DX. 600+ pages. Ouch. Now what? Maybe it is time to think about the layout: how do I want to present all this text? Clearly, a typical book layout won’t do. I turned down the font size, opted for a two-column layout, selected a more wide book format (230x185 mm) and squeezed everything I could out of those margins. As a last resort, I also allowed chapters to start on any page (as opposed to the right page only which introduces a lot of blank pages). I admit I might have overdone it a bit as the top margin is very thin, but all these changes did reduce the page size to a more manageable 470. After ordering a few copies for myself to inspect the result, I was afraid that the text would not be very readable, or the margins where the book would be glued would be too narrow. Fortunately, the end result is surprisingly pleasant to read. The cream paper Amazon provides is a nice match although the paper feels a bit too thin for my taste. Yet a hefty tome like this for €15 is ridiculously cheap so I can’t complain. The fact that the book is printed in black & white does not work against the many photos and screenshots included. Additionally, because it’s Amazon, it allows the book to be distributed and printed virtually anywhere. My copies were printed in Brétigny-sur-Orge in France. Better than China! Adapting the text When you are selecting blog posts to be included into the book, you’ll notice recurring themes you wrote about. For example, I have wasted too many words on physical video game collecting. Instead of just pasting these chapters next to each other, I wanted them to “flow” better in the book so I did rewrite portions to better match the medium. Also, in many occasions, a new chapter (thus blog post) starts with a reference to the previous one. On the site, this is just a link, but on paper, you don’t want to print “in this article”. Speaking of links, a blog or website is an interconnected medium: how to approach this on paper? I ended up putting all \href{} LaTeX links in the margin footer on the same page but did a diagonal sweep to remove the excessive ones. On the site, a long link is just hidden behind a click, but on paper, an archive.org link to a long URL is not only ugly but will never be typed over or “used” in that way. Also, internal Brain Baking links usually start with / post—in the end, I decided to keep it that way as prepending https:// brainbaking.com everywhere would mean even more text wasted. I did make a note of this in the newly written introduction. Besides the “in this post” link adaptations (don’t do this—it’s also bad for accessibility in your online blog!), I noticed I also had to do something about the images. Because of the two-column layout, the wide figures such as graphs will be squeezed into a barely readable square. You can fix this by manually adding a * to the ones you want to be displayed as a full-page spread (\figure* {}). But I made another mistake: in many posts, I write something and then add an image to emphasise the statement, ending in a semicolon to point to the image. Yet in a book, you never know precisely where that image will be included! In my future writings, I’ll take these things into account to more easily compile Brain Baking DX II in ten years. This was a lovely month project that rewarded me with a physical artefact of an ever-evolving digital medium, solidifying words, sentences, and paragraphs in a way that perhaps might even envy The Internet Archive. As a hopeless sentimental person, flipping through the book, looking at the figures and reading the text makes me happy. And also embarrassed as there are plenty of contextual and grammatical mistakes in solidified as well. I’m looking forward to revisiting the project in ten years! If you want to attempt something like this for yourself and don’t know how to approach this technically, drop me a line and I’ll be more than glad to help you out. [12]webdesign   [13]archiving  You Might Also Like... • [14]Good Blogging Habits Yield a Book Each Year 07 Jul 2024 • [15]What Happens To My Digital Identity When I Die? 18 Sep 2022 • [16]How Bad Is Link Rot At Brain Baking? 22 Dec 2024 • [17]New Exhibits At The Brain Baking Museum 01 Jul 2024 • [18]The Backup And Sync Strategy, Revised 16 May 2024 • [19]We Should Build Our Own Wayback Machines (Reprise) 29 Mar 2023 • [20]Creating Journals That Last 18 Mar 2023 Bio and Support [avatar2024] I'm [21]Wouter Groeneveld, a Brain Baker, and I love the smell of freshly baked thoughts (and bread) in the morning. I sometimes convince others to bake their brain (and bread) too. If you found this article amusing and/or helpful, you can support me via [22] PayPal or [23]Ko-Fi. I also like to hear your feedback via [24]Mastodon or email. Thanks! JavaScript is disabled. I use it to obfuscate my e-mail, keeping spambots at bay. 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[29] [brainbakin] References: [1] https://brainbaking.com/post/2026/06/the-archivist-in-me-turned-this-blog-into-a-book/#top [2] https://brainbaking.com/ [3] https://brainbaking.com/archives/ [4] https://brainbaking.com/works/ [5] https://brainbaking.com/about [6] https://brainbaking.com/more [7] https://brainbaking.com/post/2022/09/what-happens-to-my-digital-identity-when-i-die/ [8] https://brainbaking.com/post/2024/07/good-blogging-habits-yield-a-book-each-year/ [9] https://brainbaking.com/post/2026/06/the-archivist-in-me-turned-this-blog-into-a-book/pages.jpg [10] https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Baking-DX-Blog-Archives/dp/B0H271SK3K/ [11] https://brainbaking.com/post/2026/06/the-archivist-in-me-turned-this-blog-into-a-book/books-stacked.jpg [12] https://brainbaking.com/categories/webdesign [13] https://brainbaking.com/tags/archiving [14] https://brainbaking.com/post/2024/07/good-blogging-habits-yield-a-book-each-year/ [15] https://brainbaking.com/post/2022/09/what-happens-to-my-digital-identity-when-i-die/ [16] https://brainbaking.com/post/2024/12/how-bad-is-link-rot-at-brain-baking/ [17] https://brainbaking.com/post/2024/07/new-exhibits-at-the-brain-baking-museum/ [18] https://brainbaking.com/post/2024/05/the-backup-and-sync-strategy-revised/ [19] https://brainbaking.com/post/2023/03/we-should-build-our-own-wayback-machines-reprise/ [20] https://brainbaking.com/post/2023/03/creating-journals-that-last/ [21] https://brainbaking.com/about [22] https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=R2WTKY7G9V2KQ [23] https://ko-fi.com/woutergroeneveld [24] https://dosgame.club/@jefklak [25] https://brainbaking.com/post/2026/06/the-archivist-in-me-turned-this-blog-into-a-book/#top [26] https://brainbaking.com/archives [27] https://brainbaking.com/index.xml [28] https://brainbaking.com/copyright-and-tracking-policy [29] https://brainbaking.com/links