This would make an awesome gift. I've been planning on doing exactly this with my girlfriend's conversation for quite some time now, but just haven't been able to get to it.
Also, my chat history is so large, it craps out while exporting the chat. I'll try to see if I can do something about it.
I could see an application for this in the field of disaster risk management. After a hurricane for example, WhatsApp channels are becoming used to coordinate response and recovery efforts between multiple different organizations. There is a need for a tool that can extract all the information that gets shared into a report that can be used for analysis of the big picture.
I once created a little python script that would find an input search term in a WhatsApp chat archive. I have a similar chat with friends with almost 4 years of history, and a lot of daily activity, so it was cool to get a snapshot of what we spoke about.
If neither Blurb nor Publit appeal to you, I've been using Lulu.com for making hard copies of our blog about our kids. Seems to be the same price as Blurb, and has a UK division.
To generate the PDF, I use a nasty Python script to scrape the blog entries and images and massage then into LaTeX. Nasty code, but at least it works :P
By the way, this is if you want to sell books through their API's. If you just want to order something for yourself they have a separate service where you can upload & buy: http://www.simpleprintservice.com/
They aggregate volume to leverage big printing facilities, so the products you get are really high quality. (I've worked for them a couple of years ago).
I try to keep them to 12 months each, ending at the last day of a specific month. I’ve printed three books so far; you’d think the thickness of individual books would vary a lot per year, but for our group it seems the amount of chatting is constant :)
Ah okay, thanks. I'm thinking of doing something similar with a Hangouts group. You can use "Google Takeout" to export your entire Hangouts activities in JSON... so it looks like I'll need to do a bunch of my own parsing. It's a fantastic idea though!
I have to say this looks really nice. We have build a similar service with https://www.whappbook.com where we've automated the whole workflow, and give it a bit more whatsapp-like design. /end plug :). (I'm running the technical part at Whappbook).
> Our conversations range from lolcats to the very personal — just like life itself
I am not sure I'd feel comfortable sending a "very personal" conversation to a printing service, maybe I am too paranoid, but I'd rather investigate into getting some sort of home-book-binding kit and doing that as opposed to sending it off to be printed
That’s reasonable. In our case ”the very personal” usually mean opinions on events and other people, stuff that is only sensitive if you know us. I wouldn’t print logs that included bank statements, and I probably wouldn’t print this kind of thing if I were a public figure.
35 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 80.5 ms ] threadAlso, my chat history is so large, it craps out while exporting the chat. I'll try to see if I can do something about it.
Thanks for sharing!
But this is a much more useful, and novel, tool.
To generate the PDF, I use a nasty Python script to scrape the blog entries and images and massage then into LaTeX. Nasty code, but at least it works :P
I am not sure I'd feel comfortable sending a "very personal" conversation to a printing service, maybe I am too paranoid, but I'd rather investigate into getting some sort of home-book-binding kit and doing that as opposed to sending it off to be printed