Showing posts with label blog ideas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blog ideas. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

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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Sunday, May 16, 2010

Blog Books: Up Close and Personal

Ever since I started this blog in April 2007, people have been asking me when I'm going to print my blog posts into a book.   I knew that eventually I'd like to do it, especially since it took me approximately 3 days of blogging before it completely replaced my time spent scrapbooking.  Unfortunately, by the time I started researching the prospect seriously I had over 600 posts. 

The main company I kept hearing about was Blurb.  So sometime last year I downloaded their software and got to work creating my books.  It didn't take long before I realized I had a very big problem.  When uploading my pictures to the internet I always significantly reduced the size to make them easier to load.  Although they looked fine online, not a single one of them was good enough quality to print.  Suddenly I was faced with the overwhelmingly monumental task of hand replacing every single one of my photos with the higher quality version from my computer.  In other words, I was going to get it done in about 57 years.  

I dabbled with it here and there and tried to make headway on it, but  it wasn't going anywhere fast.  Now fast forward to 2010 and  I have over 1000 posts and still no book.  Then I heard from my friend Andrea about Blog2Print.  At first I thought it would be another big waste of time, but when she mentioned it only took her about 20 minutes to complete her book I was completely intrigued.  20 minute projects are just about perfect for my attention span! 

I got off to a rocky start getting my blog downloaded and had to call the company (where a real person answered the first time), but after a 5-minute phone call my blog was downloaded and I was ready to make my books.   

The hardest part about the whole process was making a few decisions (outlined below), but shockingly it really did only take about 20 minutes.  

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 Here's a glimpse of our first two books along with some of the choices you'll have when you order:

There were several unique cover styles to choose from, so I just picked a different one for each book.   

Soft covers were slightly cheaper, but we viewed these as a family history type of investment so we chose the hard covers.   The binding and page quality are both excellent. 
 
 The pictures are a little on the small side, but I was so thrilled not to have to replace them all with higher quality pictures that I couldn't care less!  


 Because of the way I blog using pictures, I wanted the entries to be laid out as they were on the blog.  My friend Andrea chose the scrapbook style layout which grouped the pictures and words in a more space saving manner, but I did not feel that that style would have worked well with most of my posts. 


Although they added numerous pages onto the length of our books, we really wanted the comments to be a part of the books.  We felt that they added a lot of personality to each post and that it wouldn't have captured the essence of our blog as well without them. 

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In summary, we are thrilled with our new family yearbooks and would highly recommend them to anyone! 

In case you're shopping around, here's what I deem to be the pros and cons of working with Blog2Print over working with Blurb (although I have to disclose I never actually ordered a Blurb book, since I could never get past the planning stages). 

Pros of Blog2Print
  • Super quick and easy to put together (totally finished a book with a whole year of posts in 20-30 minutes)
  • Good quality books
  • Didn't have to switch all my photos out for higher quality versions
  • Choice to include comments or not
  • Choice to leave out individual posts
  • The choice to make your posts as short as possible (scrapbook style) or to keep them as they're written (in relation to the placement of the photos)
  • Excellent customer service (via phone or live chat)


Cons of Blog2Print vs Blurb
  •  No ability to tweak individual posts (like changing out the picture or correcting a typo)
  • The layout on every page is the same (however you've determined you want it)
  • Cost (I actually don't really know how this compares to Blurb, since I never ordered from them, but I did feel like my books were a little pricey ~400 pages for ~$110 or so and I couldn't find an online coupon anywhere.  Really, though, it was WELL worth the price just for the time I saved!)
  • Photos rather small


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Sunday, April 18, 2010

30 Things to Blog About

I'm having a major writing block tonight, so I've decided that this post will be dedicated to an uncensored brainstormed list of ideas for blog topics that I can write about another night, when my brain is slightly less frazzled.  Feel free to vote for your favorite ideas (or go ahead and use them as a springboard for your own post). 

1.  My favorite guilty pleasures
2.  The names I almost named my kids
3. My life in Haiku
4. Facebook--love it or hate it
5.  Photo walk of my neighborhood in spring
6.  A spotlight on my favorite children's books
7.  Bake off of two celebrities' recipes
8.  How I met my husband
9.  An insider's guide for touring a local attraction
10.  Favorite board games
11.  What I wish I'd known when I first had kids
12.  Celebrities I wish I could meet and which ones I never want to meet
13.  Why keeping me up late at night is a bad idea
14.  Talking to kids about the birds and the bees
15.  A heated discussion on the ObamaCare
16.  The hazards of naming kids with unusually spelled names
17. Things I said I'd never do
18.  My least favorite children's toys
19.  The pros and cons of dog ownership
20.   My favorite cookbook and why
21.  Pet peeves
22.  My idea of comfort food
23.  The best household shortcuts I know
24.  My basement--what color should we paint it?
25.  My favorite cheap/free date night ideas
26.  Cheap/free things to do with the kids
27.   Why blogging is a stress reliever for me
28.   5 things I wish I knew how to do
29.   All about my dream vacation destination
30.  A day in the life of Lara


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