2009 Blog Book

As I always say, "My Blog is my journal", so I finally decided to print a book of it. If you've considered one you might want to read this, otherwise this might be kind of boring. I found a deal for Blog2Print back in October and bought a 20 page Hard-cover book for $12 which was half off the original price. I started my blog the summer of 2009 and only had 17 posts that year, so I thought this would be perfect to try for my first book. It was actually a really easy process, once I worked around some of the formatting issues.
Here are the issues: First of all, you download all the posts from your blog. You can put in a range of dates so it only does the ones you want which was pretty nice. Then you can tell it whether you want your blog Compact, which makes the best use of space by rearranging your photos and text to use fewer pages, or Snapshot, which keeps your photos and text layout as it is and uses more pages to keep your alignment. I actually tried the Compact first, but I always put captions below the pictures and of course they weren't below the pictures. So I went with the Snapshot. The only problem with doing it this way was that it was way more pages, and there were some posts that could have had all the pictures condensed but weren't because that's how you have it on your blog.
The worst thing about Blog2Print is that after you download your posts and it automatically makes the book for you, you can't change the format at all really. I wanted to be able to drag pictures here and there and put page-breaks in so that the posts didn't start at the bottom of one page, and it won't let you. I finally just went back to each post on my blog, good thing there were only 17, and took out all the extra spaces between pictures, and rearranged the captions so that two pictures would go together. It took a while, but it wasn't that bad.
Then, when I was done fixing all of my posts I downloaded it again, and was finally happy with the end result. It wasn't perfect, but it was as good as it was going to get.
I ended up with 45 pages, so I had to pay a little more, but I found a 20% off code and I had my giftcard I had already bought, so I ended up just paying $7 for shipping. so the total was $19 for a Hard-back 45 page book. I'm actually really happy with the book.
Now for my 2010 book, I'm looking in to other options that have more flexiblity, but I can't argue that this book was extremely easy and fast to make, once my posts were how I wanted them.
Here are a few pictures of my completed book.

Front and Back covers

This is a good example of how I changed the format on my posts so that the pictures would sit next to each other rather then above each other.

These last two pictures show how a post can start at the bottom of one page, and how the caption from one picture might end up on the next page.