A few days ago my wife was talking about a presentation she saw on printing blogs. She thought that it would be a great idea so that we could have those memories in print.
I looked at several different companies that do automatic printing, pulling the blog and creating a printable PDF. All the ones that I tried (Blog2Print, Sharebook, Shutterfly, Blurb) didn’t offer good control of how I wanted the book to look like. Most created too many pages, figures since they charge by the page, the margins were too wide and there was no flow.
Then I came across this blog post, and this blogger’s experience with a site called Lulu. She explains all the things you have to do to publish in their platform. This was the other side of the spectrum, you got a Word template and you have to pull in every post from your site! How long would that take.
I gave it a try, open the Word document, opened a web page with a short post, copy-past, 5 minutes later was a post I was really proud of. I mean, I was really proud of what it looked like, it looked like the web, but formal, something you would expect of a printed book. Here is a side by side comparison of the same post from Blog2Print and my template:
I started with the Year 2014, it is one of the most complete, after that I hope to order 2015 soon after this year is over. I hope to be able to catch up 2015, and then every time I publish a post I added it to book. Wish me luck.