Blog Book

Here's a post from my personal blog from last February about my blog book. I need to start working on my 2009 book now. If you're interested in making one, here's some info about it.

"I am so excited! I started making my first blog book a couple of weeks ago. There's a website, http://www.blurb.com, with a free software program that "slurps" your blog posts into a book. Then you can edit the formatting, spelling, and pictures as needed, upload your book, and order it. I spent about 3 days working on it, then got it today. It's just how I wanted it.

Ever since I started my blog, it's been mostly a journal for me. Now it's not just something I can enjoy, but it's something my kids can enjoy when they are older, as well. I'd love to get a couple more later, so each of our kids can have one.

The program is easy to use. It gives you a warning if the pictures are too big to look good when printed. Since blogger shrinks all my pictures for the internet, I couldn't print them very big. They are big enough to support the journaling, but not big enough to be the focus of the book. I do scrapbook and have all of my pictures backed up on the computer, so I'm ok with that. The journaling is the focus of the book for me, anyway. I even have several pictures from my camera phone, and they look just fine in this format.

Some of the sample books I saw on the website showed a full page picture next to the journaling on the other side. I like this look. In order to make the pictures bigger, you can upload them right from your computer instead of using the blog versions. Since I was dealing with 14 months of almost daily posts, it wasn't worth the time to me. You can make it as simple or complicated as you want.

Here's my first book - I guess you can say I'm a published author now."