Blurb Bites (1 of 3)

I don't know about the rest of you, but the way I justify spending time on my blog is that it is a record for posterity. A journal with pictures. One small problem, though. I doubt my posterity will be checking blogger looking for posts from me. I decided to publish my blog, which would accomplish the record part and also serve as a backup for what I've already done. I have heard horror stories of people being locked out of their blogs and no longer being able to access their information.

I think most people in the blogging world have heard of blurb.com, which is a company that serves as a vanity press for people who want to make their own books. Blurb used to have a way to "slurp" blog posts and pictures into their software, thus enabling the publishing of a bound book of blog posts. The photo above is my original attempt at blurb. It is softbound because I cheaped out at the last minute. It cost about 65 cents for a single sided page.

Blurb is no longer capable of "slurping" posts from blogger into their software, which is just as well since I was not happy with my finished product. Sure, it was great to have a bound book, and the photo printing quality was sufficient, but the end did not justify the means. The entire book, which is slightly over 100 pages, took more than forty hours to complete. The software was frustrating and the process was too slow. My kids adore reading it, though. It's already bent. I should have ordered two.

I looked around for other companies that can publish blogs. Shutterfly will publish books and has some layouts that will take large amounts of text, but they are mucho expensivo and transferring the text from the blog into Shutterfly is tedious. Their pictures are great, though.

There are a couple of other companies out there that will publish blogs, and one or two that will back them up. I tried them. I didn't like them either. I never actually published on any of them because I finally figured out that my problem with blog books is that they read like a book, and I want them to read like my blog.

The above picture shows a sample Saturday Synopsis, which is where I write about the details of my family's week. It's the kind of stuff that is boring now but hopefully will be worth something someday. None of the blog publishing places I found had an option for printing pictures followed by a paragraph, followed by another picture, which is my primary format in writing my blog. They required that I cut and paste all text after downloading the pictures. A huge drag. Plus, it just never looked right.

After messing around for a couple of months, I finally figured out a couple of easy and satisfactory ways to make a hard copy of a blog. Stay tuned for tomorrow's post, Quick and Dirty (2 of 3).