Printing the Blog

The last few months I've been working on editing my blog. I deleted over 300 posts and also deleted portions of hundreds of other posts. I took out some of the adoption posts (since we never adopted) as well as ones that were about miscellaneous topics unrelated to the kids (football, basketball, movies, politics, finding bargains, etc.). I could have continued to spend hours editing the blog, but I decided enough was enough. I have learned from my experience, and I'm now labeling a post with "edit" if there's a portion of the post I want to delete prior to printing or with "delete" if I want the whole post deleted before I print that section. It should be MUCH easier to edit the blog the next time I print a portion of it. I'm thinking in June I'll print my 5th volume (September 12, 2010-June 2011).

The last few days I was exploring options for printing the blog. Blurb was cheaper than Blog2print, but I didn't like the way Blurb arranged the posts and pictures. I was tempted to just go with Blog2print until I actually uploaded my posts and realized the cost would be a little more than $400 to print from December 2006 - September 2010 (into four volumes because books are limited in terms of both pages as well as number of pictures). That price was for one black/white soft cover book (Dec 2006 - June 2008) and three full color hard cover books.

I think these volumes will be special to me in the years to come, and I also think that Nadia will treasure reading them some day (and maybe Ian's wife?). Many pictures that I've never included in a scrapbook or photo book are included in the blog. It's also a combination of a baby book and diary of sorts. In the end I purchased pdf files of the volumes from Blog2Print ($8 each) and then ordered the copies to be made from another website for $100. I read reviews which said the Blog2Print books turn out really nice. If I don't like the quality of the company I am using this time, I'll try a different company next time. If I print one book a year it won't be as expensive as right now when I'm printing four years of posts. I actually like the fact that I also have pdf files. If the books are damaged or lost, I can view them electronically or print them again. Three of the books are 200+ pages long and the fourth book is 400+ pages long.