Thursday, September 3, 2009
Suggestions
Ok, in all my early-morningness, I've been trying to make my blog into a book. Has anyone else done this yet and what website or software did you use? Please? I've started one on about 5 different sites and have thought each one is going to take a lot more work than I was hoping for. Why can't it just print it out exactly as I have it laid out? All of them I'll have to go through and re-format - when they pull in my blog none of the pictures are near the text where I'm discussing it, etc. Can I just go to a printing place and just print the thing out exactly how it is and bind it? Or then do I have that side stuff showing up on every page (like the archives and stuff). Please someone tell me you've done this and that it doesn't have to be hard. That's why I thought blogging was supposed to be easy - so you could journal and scrapbook and just print it out. I don't want to go through every page and have to reposition it all! Thanks.
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Hey Jen,
Firstly I love it how you are getting up early. If it goes well for you I may have to give it a try. I have thought forever that it may be nice but my desire to sleep has always won out.
On the blog book, I used Blurb. It was not super easy and I did end up doing quite a bit of reformatting but it was worth it. I absolutely LOVE the books (I did one for 2007 and another for 2008). I would say it took me between one and two hours per book. But I did not do it in one sitting so I am not sure. It is worth it though. I really do love those books. And when it was all said and done I was glad I had to mess with the formatting because I liked making pictures different sizes, etc. I do remember thinking that it was not quite as easy as I thought it would be.
A lot of my friends used Blurb and the books turned out beautifully. They did say it was a lot of work and one friend even loaded them on to Blurb after she was done writing the post. I've heard A LOT of good things about blog2print. They look just as nice as Blurb but without all the formatting and they also publish all the comments too!
Blog2print is good, but if you're looking to put an entire year's worth of blog (pics & text) then you'll have to be careful of the 100 page maximum (last time I checked). I also love Blurb, but take a lot of time to format the pages, especially with the newest version, where you can change around the text and photo boxes to any size you want (love this!). I've published my blog with Blurb for the past 3 years, and last year my book was like 300 pages, so Blurb is the only choice that will do one that long. It's nice to have a hard-cover book, and it's not too expensive. But a lot of time to do it.
Actually, I looked today, and it looks like on blog2print you can now do as many pages as you want. Let us know what you end up going with! :)
Ok, I'm going to go ahead and pretend this is my blog and make a million comments. But I just tried to import my blog to blog2print just to see, and there's a 1000 pic limit. (Jan 1-present I have 1108) So if that's an issue for you...you'd have to make 2 volumes out of it.
I smell an opportunity here. for someone who isn't too busy having/raising children and who has a few bucks to invest.
a new blogging site that prints your blog "in house" so there is no re-formatting garbage to sort through. I actually had the idea about a month ago. but I'd make it a private journal entry site as well. (since i don't blog for a number of reasons but I would LOVE to have a private journaling site)
so there ya go. take it someone out there... I'll be expecting a royalties check in the mail when it's huge though thank you very much.
I used blurb and I loved it.
Blurb...but it took so long...that i still haven't fully formatted my first book. it used to be the only one that would "slurp" info straight off your blogger acct...maybe that has changed.
I used blurb too. I actually cut and paste every post into the document because I felt picky about how it looked. You CAN slurp it, apparently, but for me, I wanted to just be in control, cuz I'm like that :) But I LOVE MY BOOK. Love it. It's like a gorgeous hardback text book with good quality pages and pictures :)
Sorry this is way late. But I finally had a chance to read blogs today. I used blurb and it is fine. I decided I really don't care that much about the formatting and fanciness of it. It's just a journal. I just slurped it and fiddled a bit and then settled with what I had. I just need to order it. Jeff made one from scratch about Taiwan and I love it! But maybe that is just cause my husband made a scrapbook! So all in all it isn't the ultimate site...but it's better than nothing and it isn't how I want to spend my time. Pictures and text is all that is really important to me. However, I think I'm going to check out the blog2print that people mentioned.
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