This Is What I've Been Waiting For!!

I started blogging with this very goal in mind- to publish my blog into a series of books for my family. I used to scrapbook like crazy, but don't anymore. I kept a journal when I was a teenager, but frankly, those memories are not the best reflection of my life's history. But this blog has been a great way to combine both. The site I used is blurb.com and they make it about as easy as you can imagine. Here's what I ended up with after my first 6 months of blogging:

The front and back covers- you can choose hard or soft cover, I chose soft. It's cheaper.

You can "slurp" your entire blog into their program, and then choose which entries you want to publish. I didn't select all of mine, just the ones that reflected our family or things I felt my kids would enjoy reading one day.

I take a lot of pictures that I don't put on my blog... mostly because I'm too impatient to wait for them to all load, and I realize that unless you are a blood relation or very dear friend, you probably don't really want to see all 45 shots of my kids in the snow. But this program gives you the option of importing additional photos from your hard drive. So I did few photo pages, which were a lot of fun:
As you can see, they have all kinds of templates to choose from. You can also select different background designs, with the option of customizing the colors as you like:

There is one template that allows for a page full of small photos. This works well if your photos are simple, and close-up. If they are busy or small, the detail is lost:

You also have to have high resolution pictures, or the quality is very poor. I think once I get my NEW BIRTHDAY CAMERA... (that WAS a hint I picked up from you baby, wasn't it???) then I can improve the quality of my pictures, which will translate into sharper prints.

Anyway. If you are a blogger, I highly recommend looking into this program. My book was 100 pages long, and the softcover price was $29. Of course, after I added shipping, it jumped all the way to $40, but I still feel it's money well spent. It's certainly cheaper than scrapbooking, and I find it more enjoyable because I can write more.
One hundred pages for me was six months' worth of blogging. That was roughly 70 entries. I did some two page spreads, and some pages with extra photos. A hundred pages is a fairly manageable sized book.

Anyway. I love it. I plan to continue doing it, probably twice a year.