You’ve heard the saying, “Done is better than perfect?” I am very bad at that one. I just could not follow that in this case, to my own detriment. Sigh. I spent a lot of time on this project.
Cyberspace being rather intangible, I want to be able to look through my blog posts in book format. I’ve been thinking of doing it for as long as I’ve had this blog, 2.5 years now. Should my blog ever get erased for some odd reason, I want to have it all here in front of me in tangible form.
Several of my friends have used Blog2Print to easily print books of their blogs, which looked cool to me, but I could NOT figure out how to make it work for me. I didn’t like the page layouts, I couldn’t include any of the post comments (my favorite part), and it was also pricey. I finally figured out that maybe it had to do with changing over to my own domain last year. So maybe it will work for the past few months but it had such trouble getting to my posts, with all sorts of time outs and password issues.
So I made books in 6-month groupings in BookSmart, my go-to program for creating our family scrapbooks. (That’s an affiliate link but I have made nothing from them, just had to tell you in full disclosure that if you use that link, they may pay me a few cents.)
It took me absolutely for.e.ver. to make my first year in books but I do love them. I had to cut and paste all the text and photos, rearrange the layouts, etc. I made one of the first 6 months, uploaded it to my shopping cart to order, and decided to use that as a template to make the next book so I could order them together. However, when I uploaded the second one to the shopping cart, the first one had disappeared (must order within 14 days or it’s wiped forever… gulp). There was no getting it back. So I ordered that second one, made the first one AGAIN, yep, and ordered that one.
I like BookSmart because you can literally control everything. (Who is out there laughing??? I can hear you!) Layout, font, colors. All customizable.
Let me just say that it was awesome to look back at my first year of posts. I had very few followers then and no idea what I was doing, and yet it was wonderful. It reminded me to get back in touch with a few friends. It’s a journey from there to here and it reminds me that I still don’t know what wonderful place I’m headed, but I keep posting three days a week and love how it is such a significant part of my identity and daily life.
And now I need to make the next book. 2 down, 3 to go and time’s a wastin’!
P.S. You can get 15% off at Blurb during the month of July with code SUMMERFUN.
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