Blog Book

I started this blog way back in August of 2007 right after Wesley was born. I've always wanted to turn it into a book and I finally got around to it this year. As it turns out there aren't a huge amount of options out there for turning a blog into a book. There is the option where you create your book, page by page, importing pictures and text from your blog. This is a time consuming and expensive option but yields the nicest book. I started with this option. Blurb is a nice site to create a book. I downloaded the software and launched the daunting process of copying and pasting each post and finding each high quality picture from a CD (from 2007 mind you). It took half a day to get a few pages done and I gave up. It would have easily taken a couple of weeks to bring in all 68 posts from 2007. I wasn't willing to invest that kind of time, I wanted something easier. Not to mention the next book would be for 2008 which contained 282 posts(!).

So I continued on my search for an easy to make blog book. I ran across IntoRealPages.com. They provide the other option to bloggers that want a book. You just enter your domain name and dates you'd like covered in your book and they do the rest. It's beautifully formatted and not all that expensive. It was like night and day compared to Blurb. Oddly enough I didn't realize they were not in the US until I placed my order and had to pay for DHL overseas shipping. They are a Netherlands based company, Groningen to be precise. I ordered the first year of the blog with 68 blog entries and it was $32 plus $14 shipping. I had it in less than two weeks. I plan to order the next year soon and try and do a year every so often until I have a nice set of blog books for all nine of the years I've been blogging. Since they are mostly about the kids, I think it's a pretty nice set of baby books for them to read.