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)

The birthday season

Right after Christmas, we start into what I term "The Birthday Season."  My children have their birthdays within about two months of Christmas.  This always makes it tricky when purchasing for Christmas because you always have to keep one eye on the upcoming birthdays.  Well, we've just had the last birthday of The Birthday Season!

J, HaPpY BiRtHdAy!  We LoVe YoU!

Blog Book

I tried something new yesterday.  I signed up on blog2print.com and created my first blog book.  I decided to try creating the book using just my blog entries from 2008 (September through December).  The book cost about $25.00, but I did not use the "consolidation" function so as to have fewer pages (and therefore lower cost), so we will see what the finished product looks like.  If I like the book, I will try making one for 2009.  Of course, 2009 is my first full year of blogging so the cost will be more because I had more posts during that year, but I will use consolidation of pages and not include comments (SORRY!) which whittles about $10 or $12 dollars off the overall price.  I'll keep you posted!  BTW, there is no shipping cost.