Print your Blog into a Book

If you've ever wanted to print your blog or have been trying to figure out how to preserve your blog memories, I'm going to be your new best friend! Today I received my blog for 2008 in a beautiful 8x10 full color, hardbound book! It's like a beautiful journal/scrapbook of all our family's memories and pictures. I'm so excited. And I'm going to tell you how you can do it too!

Front Cover
Sample Layout. The text is Tige's memories of Abby's birth and it actually wasn't included in my blog, but I added it for this book. The pictures were all imported straight from my blog.

Sample Layout. All of this was imported straight from the blog, and I just changed the layouts to accomodate how many pictures I had on that blog entry.

Here's what you need to do:

1. The website is http://www.blurb.com/ I have made other books from this site, like a biography about my grandma, but I was thrilled when I found out they had a fast and easy way to "slurp" your blog straight into a book. You can visit the website for information on on pricing--which varies depending on your book's size and how many pages.

2. Create a membership with a username and password (it's free) and then download Blurb's "booksmart" software (it's free too). This is the software you'll use to make the book.

3. Open the Booksmart program, and click Create a new book. It'll ask you to choose the size you want. You'll then choose a background theme (as you can see, I choose a "dark room" theme with black pages and white writing). You can change this later if you don't like how it looks.

4. It will ask what layout you want and you'll choose "Blog to Book." It asks for your blog username and password, and voila! It "slurps" your blog straight into the book. It will list all your blog posts, and you check all the ones you want included (so you could do it year by year, or skip ones you don't want, or whatever). THAT'S IT!

It uses a default layout with a text box and a spot for 6 pictures. If you had more pictures than that with each post, the rest of the pictures will be placed on the following page. I then went through each page and choose a custom layout that fit how many pictures were on that particular post. Some have one large picture on the page, and other posts have several smaller pictures (see samples above). You can customize to fit however you'd like.

It was quite easy to navigate through and make changes once you're in there. You could customize each page to have a different background color or patterns or whatever you want. I did mine mostly all black with white writing because I didn't want to fuss with it for a long time. Overall, it didn't take too long. Next year, I'll make it fancier, but I wanted to see how this one turned out first. You can preview it on screen, and when it's ready, click order.

If you get started and need some help, I'd be glad to answer any questions over the phone or e-mail. Let me know. I'm thrilled with my book and that our memories and pictures are preserved in a printed, bound book. (Who has time for a journal or to stay caught-up with scrapbooking, right?)