Easy Blog Books

Six years ago I started blogging as a fun way to keep in touch with my family.  I could post pictures and tell stories without inundating their inboxes with emails they'd only ever read once.    It was not long after those first few tentative posts that I realized that blogging was a good fit for me.  It allowed me the opportunity to record our lives like I'd been doing off and on in scrapbooks and journals for years and it provided an easy way to share it with others.  I found that I liked the challenge of writing in an interesting and comprehensible way and I loved having a place outside of a shoebox for my photos.

After a year or so of blogging regularly, Glen started commenting about how we needed to print up our blog and keep copies of it for our posterity.  I spent a few years researching and discovering labor intensive blog books (like Blurb) that would NOT work for us.  I like to spend my time blogging and not hours and hours designing a book.    That is how we discovered Blog2Print.

With Blog2Print, the average blog book takes me about 20-30 minutes to upload, design, and order.  There were a few minor gripes I had with the design (mainly the small size of photos), but it's right up my alley and attention span and I've been ordering them every year.  I kept thinking that one of these times I'd try to design a book with larger photos again, but somehow I've never gotten past the first few pages.

Then a few weeks ago, I saw an announcement that Blog2Print has upgraded their design options and you can now choose the size of photos you want.  It was just the motivation I needed to order my most recent book and become their #1 biggest fan.

Here's a glimpse at our latest blog book:

It's worth the splurge to get the highest quality binding.  It is heavy duty, the pages are thick and glossy, and  is completely worthy of family heirloom status.

I put my pictures in the x-large size on my blog and wanted them x-large in my book as well.  It ends up being more pages, but is so much more fun to read and enjoy! 

If you're like me and use photos to tell your story, then you'll want to make sure you pick the option to have the photos stay in place inside each post.  You can choose a space saving option to cram the photos all together, but in our books it would have lost some of the effect.  

I liked how when I put the pictures side-by-side in the post, that they printed side-by-side in the book as well.  

My only gripe at all is that vertical photos tend to leave a lot of unused space on a page.  I'm so enamored with the rest of the options though, that it doesn't bother me a bit.  

One more glimpse of the awesomeness!!!!

I wonder how many years it will take to fill the bookshelf...



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