Every couple of years, I sit down and dump my blog to one of the printing services, so that if (when) the internet blows up, I have a copy. Recently, I printed the last four years, from 2012 to 2015.
The books were sitting on the coffee table, because I hadn't put them away yet, and the girl picked one up. She proceeded to read all the entries about her, in all four of the books.
"I did this?" "I said that?"
And in that moment I realized that it really does act as a sort of baby book. No first words, but her height's in there at least once, and there's a haircut, and the first day of kindergarten, and the first day of middle school, and various and sundry other milestones.
And it makes me happy that I now have printed, bound volumes from 2006 to 2015.
UPDATE
Because a number of people have asked, the service I use is Blog 2 Print. It is not perfect, but it is fast and reasonably easy, and there's not a lot of futzing required. It supports Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad and Tumblr. You provide the URL for your blog and select some parameters (like date range, whether or not to include comments, whether each post is on its own page). You get to write a little dedication, you choose from a bunch of preformatted covers, and you're able to choose (or upload) a picture for the front and back covers. Because I'm cheap, I go for the most compact layout (because it's fewer pages), but it does mean that the photos aren't necessarily where they had been in the original post. Also, I found a handful of places where the wrong photo got sucked in - I think in every case it was an instance where the photo had been hosted elsewhere, like a book cover image from Amazon. And it doesn't play nicely with Instagram - a photo inserted using the Instagram embed code comes through as just the widget code. While I'd rather the final product had been perfect, I'm not concerned enough to spend a lot of time going back and making it perfect (and paying for a reprint). In short, it got the job done.
(PS Blog 2 Print didn't pay me to write anything, and didn't ask me to do this.)
7 comments:
Ooh, tell me more about this. I should do this too. How did you format it all?
I have each year printed too. blog2print is what I use - which I think you told me about.
Which service do you recommend? I've thought about doing this dozens of times. Do you have to do a lot of formatting, or is it more filling out a form, paying, and then the book is delivered?
I join the clamor: what do you use for this? I realize that in many ways I am my children's diaries. With so little pencil being put to paper in this era, a printout of my blog will probably be their best memory keeper.
I also use the cheapest format available at Blog2print and have been happy with it. My blog is almost all text, with few photos, so it works well. I try to remember to print a year around the time of my blog anniversary, so it's my happy blog birthday to me present.
I do this too! I Love having my blog on the coffee table. The kids read them, especially Auggie, and I know it cements his memory, in the best way, OH YEAH I REMEMBER THAT! (these blogs to books are the best money spent. ever)
This is such a good idea. I really need to set some money aside to do this....doing it all at once will cost a fortune but if I do a year every so often it should work. Thanks for the idea!
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