Scrapping my blog

I've been spending a little time lately working with a new program that is letting me design a book from my blog. I got the free software on Blurb.com. It automatically took my blog (I just chose the entries from 2007) and put them into a book format. It used the same template for each page which consisted of 5 small photos down the outside of the page and the text in the middle. This doesn't work well for pages with fewer photos, so I am going through and changing the template on each page, sometimes adding additional photos that I didn't put on the blog - or when I linked to my Picasa photo albums. When I'm done, I can have a hard-bound book printed out for around $40-50 (for an 8x10 book of about 100 pages). Smaller books with fewer pages can be printed for less - I think prices start under $13. I've been wanting to somehow archive the blog so we have a copy that doesn't depend on blogger.com. This has been the easiest way.

I looked at a few other sites that have software for creating photo books, but blurb.com is the only one that automatically reads in your blog. Wait, I take that back. I did find one called Scrapbook Blogger that was all web based, but there were only about 6 or 8 page templates and it was very limiting. The software from Blurb has a ton of templates. There was one other program (that didn't automatically read in the blog) that had templates I liked better - but the price for a 100 page book would have been $180!

I can't wait to see the finished product. But I think it will be awhile. I don't have a lot of time to spend on it and even thought it is all electronic, it still takes some time for me to get the pages just right. I'll let you know how the book turns out.