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I prefer reading technical blogs in Kindle, is there an easy way to convert a technical blog from any site – MSDN blog or personal sites – to a e-book format like .mobi?

I am aware of http://blog2book.pothi.com/ but it supports only Blogspot and WordPress sites.

Edit I tried Calibre to download blogs via custom news feeds and it downloads recently added items only. I could not find a way to download the archive in chronological order. If we can compile the blog into a book it would be worth a read. We don't find may technical e-books in e-pub or mobi format for download. The technical blogs would have enough information to read it as a book.

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    I should add that blog2book only outputs in PDF. Which is not ideal for ebooks. You can easily create mobis and epubs from the Calibre solution mentioned below.
    – idiotprogrammer
    Apr 4 '14 at 17:47
  • I definitely hear what you're saying, but the way each CMS handles archives will differ. Perhaps you could write custom scripts or recipes. Or if you need it as a permanent reference, you can just cut and paste into Sigil editor manually. Consider switching your needs so you can store copies of individual articles in Evernote or Instapaper. These allow you to archive articles from within a browser and read them on a mobile app. It sounds as though you want something other than ebooks.
    – idiotprogrammer
    Apr 9 '14 at 18:22
  • I am sorry if i sounded like copying others content, the sole reason I am asking is for reading. Some blogs like drwpf.com/blog and ericlippert's blog are worthy reading from beginning to end. I cannot do it when I commute using kindle, so want to read it in my kindle like a book. Hence the question. I do use Pocket and Instapaper, but they are useful with single blog pages. But for larger content a kindle would be a better option.
    – Carbine
    Apr 10 '14 at 5:28
  • Also look at answers of ebooks.stackexchange.com/questions/294/…
    – claws
    Aug 10 '15 at 2:01
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    Some more similar services: newstoebook.com and papyruseditor.com/en/blog2book
    – claws
    Aug 10 '15 at 2:08
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I used to convert web pages to PDF, but on the Kindle it is much nicer to read mobi documents.

To convert web pages to mobi, I highly recommend the GrabMyBooks firefox extension. It is the one piece of software that has dramatically improved my experience on my Kindle this year (and I already use great software such as Briss, Librerator and Kranf's Kindle Collection Manager).

GrabMyBooks lets you gradually build an ebook in a separate Firefox tab by selecting web pages or content as you go. You can add pages one by one by right-clicking on the page and selecting "Grab this Page". If you only want part of a page, you can also select text and grab it. And you can also select multiple links and grab them, which is very convenient if you are interested in multiple blog posts.

Usually, when you grab a web page for your ebook, there are many components of the page you do not want: the sidebars, the comments and so on. GrabMyBooks is pretty good at guessing which content you want, but it sometimes gets it wrong. In these cases, it's very useful to be able to select the text you want, right-click and choose "Grab selected text".

By default, GrabMyBooks creates an Epub. But in the Settings, you can tell it to create a mobi file. For GrabMyBooks to create mobi files, you must have Calibre installed. You then tell GrabMyBooks where Calibre is installed. This may sound like a lot of work, but configuring GrabMyBooks properly is well worth it if you want a luxury experience of creating ebooks from web content on the fly.

For instance, there is a setting where you specify the default save directory. Well, I have it save my ebooks directly to my Kindle's "documents" folder.

Also, there is an option where GrabMyBooks saves an Epub file in addition to the mobi file. This allows you to later load the Epub book in GrabMyBooks and edit it again, adding or deleting web pages. In the settings, you can set a directory where the software will save Epubs, since your default format will be mobi.

I recommend always editing the Metadata setting before grabbing your book so that it displays with a nice title and author name.

Hope you like it as much as I do.

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    Thank you very much for the answer. Will try this and let you know my experience.
    – Carbine
    Apr 12 '14 at 12:43
  • @BharathramAttiyannan Let me know if you run into hiccups. It took me a while to find the optimal set-up as a Kindle user, and I only got it right (I think) a few weeks ago.
    – zx81
    Apr 12 '14 at 19:03
  • @BharathramAttiyannan I added the paragraph starting with "Usually, when you grab a web page for your ebook" to how GMB decides which part of the page you want in the ebook, and what to do when it gets it wrong.
    – zx81
    Apr 12 '14 at 23:12
  • gram my books is extremely simple to use and easier to edit than calibre. I used calibre to convert to mobi as well.. Though it doesnt allow me to grab the entire archive atleast, I liked the option to grab all the tabs in one go. Cheers.
    – Carbine
    Apr 14 '14 at 4:58
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Fortunately, there is already an easy solution.

First, you need to find a way to scrape the site. Probably from RSS feeds. http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/2013/12/how-to-find-and-view-rss-feeds-in-various-browsers/ When you can find the RSS feed, you need to figure out if it has a full feed and not a partial one. (But I think there are tools around to pull the full article from a partial feed if you to do that. Let's hope the full RSS is available though).

Calibre has a feature called "Fetch News" which can convert active RSS feeds into an ebook format of your choice. http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/news.html

You just choose the dropdown, Add a custom news source, and then enter the appropriate RSS feed. (You can further customize the recipe with python code, but generally you do not need to worry about that).

By the way, if this is a well-known tech site, Calibre may already have a recipe for it which you can use. You can check if this is true by choosing the dropdown Schedule a News Download

After you have created the ebook you will need to get it to your device. Either you can email it to your kindle device or sync it via USB (which Calibre can do for you btw).

The resulting ebook doesn't look pretty, but it is readable.

I suspect the biggest problem would be if the RSS feed is defective or partial. Recently a lot of news site has stopped publishing full RSS feeds.

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Use "Clip to Evernote" - An extension for Google Chrome. With it it is possible to capture the entire page or Article, Simplified Article, etc. from website or blog. Open in the editor of the Evernote program, where you can edit completely, as in Word.

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