My first blog book

As you know, a few weeks ago, I'd gone on the blog2print website and uploaded my first four months of blogging (for 2008) to create a blog book.  On Saturday, I received the book in the mail. I'd upload a picture here but I really don't think it would do it justice.  If you're a blogger, click on this link and try it out for yourself--you don't have to download any software and you can get an estimate in minutes of how much it would cost to print your own.  http://blog2print.sharedbook.com/blogworld/printmyblog/index.html

I was really pleased with how it looked--well, the printing of it, the cover and the quality of paper.   I was pleased that the pictures all came through (even if some of them were pretty small) because the other website for printing blog books that I had tried to use initially had flagged about half of them as not being print quality (resolution was too low, I think). (Those were pictures I'd taken from the Internet or that I'd received through email.)  Everything was very readable--no microscopic print.  There was a logical, chronological flow.

As for the general layout (which I knew I was getting from the preview, so no surprise), it was very straight forward--a "no frills" layout.  Of course, I am always the type of person who wants to tweak the layout of things . . . maybe that is a holdover from my years working on the high school newspaper (four years) and the high school and college (one year each ) yearbook. However, earlier when I tried another company for printing the blog, I got so bogged down in "tweaking" that it could have been several years before it met my standards.  So when I tried out the blog2print website, I decided I would just go with the default layout and it is adequate.  I believe you can do some altering--I was just not going to let myself get that sucked in.

After I save up some more money, I am going to print my first full year of blogging (2009) using the same company.  This time for the layout, I plan to select a consolidated layout because I have a lot more blah blah blogging in that year than I had in 2008.  I did a trial run for the new booklet including comments (I didn't include comments in the 2008 booklet) and the estimate said it was going to cost over $75.  I'm going to try to whittle the price down to somewhere under $50 by leaving out the comments, using the consolidated layout, and deleting any entries I can live without.

The first thing I thought, after receiving the 2008 book, after seeing how nice it looked, and after feeling I had received my money's worth, was that I wished my initial foray into blogging had been something that was really worth printing!  :o)