Last summer I told Dave I wanted a web service that could download my blog and print it in a book so I could have a nice, permanent hard copy with all the pictures and comments. He told me it doesn't exist. Au contraire.
For Christmas my sister-in-law Natalee, with help from sister-in-law Shanda and her sister, made my girls an awesome personalized ABC book. They used a scrapbooking software for the page layouts, did quotes and scriptures for the words and used family and other photos for the pictures. I asked Shanda where you get something like that printed, and she said Blurb.com. Then she said,
"You can also publish your blog."
It's awesome. You can make your own cookbook, poetry book, blog book, whatever you want. Just give your login and it "slurps" your blog into one of 15 layout formats, then you can manually tweak things to your liking. You can also choose whether to include comments, and whether to print hyperlinks as footnotes. Then, once you finish and self-publish, you have the option to place your book in the Blurb bookstore for other people to buy, and you can buy other people's books.
I want a hard copy of my blog because it's like a journal, a record of me, for me. But seeing Natalee's book and the other books in the bookstore show that the possibilities are endless. Publish your own children's book, a family cookbook, or portfolio.
You can even buy my blog.
8 comments:
Oh, man, I wish I hadn't read this so late in the evening. I have just spent roughly two hours mocking up my awesome book and it's now 1:45am.
The only thing is, blurb doesn't support comments from blogger. I tried changing my settings, but it's really just not one of your choices if you're using blogger. Something about API's and blogger being too difficult... which is a real bummer because I don't think I want a record that doesn't include the comments. They support comments from some other sites, but not this one. Grr.
I know, I had the same problem so I stopped editing my book and emailed tech support about it. He said it's a good question and he's looking into it. So I'm waiting until I hear back from him before doing more to arrange things. I agree, the comments are a huge part of the blog to me, but I guess a book w/o comments is still better than no book at all. If I publish annually eventually it will be available.
You are out of your mind staying up until 1:45. I would never recover from that. But it is fun. Upon first slurp my book of year 2007 blog entries was 143 pages. I'm going to see about paring that down a bit with layout changes, and most of the photos I used are just general pics from the internet that don't have to be in there.
That is totally brilliant.
I write a family newsletter (email) that I send to both sides of the family each week that I want to publish yearly along with my blog. I have been putting it off for a month now. Thanks so much for sharing this fantastic web site. I normally use www.lulu.com for my self publishing projects but I haven't looked into if they do blog conversion or not. Awesome find thanks a million!
FYI here's the answer I got from the blurb tech support guy:
"I have received confirmation that comments are unable to be slurped at this time. This is because blog service are constantly changing the technologies used on their sites and it is difficult to stay abreast of these changes. We hope to have the comments feature back up and running in the next release of BookSmart."
I guess I'll go ahead and publish 2007 w/o comments and hope for the feature next year.
I wonder if this would bea good way to publish our family website stuff. Dave, what do you think?
I like that idea a lot, Maren.
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