My Blog - My Newspaper - My Book

I started my blog after a friend mentioned to me that she was going to turn her blog into a book, that there were companies that would take your blog and print it in a book. WOW! I had now idea! That was part of the reason that I wasn't blogging yet, I new about the concept, I even know how to do web design. I had a vanity site back in the mid 90's, and in the late 90's I got paid to design a pretty extensive website.

Fastforward 10 years and 5 kids later and I knew I didn't have time to tinker around with a website, and I was only so - so about keeping my journal up to date. I had switched to a computerized journal in 2000 - alpha journal is a great little journaling program that allows you to add pictures, etc like a word processor, but it also timestamps and keeps all of my entries organized by date, and is searchable. I can even have several different journals under my username and password, so I occasionally write things down about the kids, in their own special section of my journal. I also let each of the kids use the program. They love having their own login and password, and love to type their journal, play around with the fonts, etc. It is a lot easier for me to read also, and I don't have to worry about losing their papers all over the house.

Whenever I think about this, which is rare, I worry about all the history that is lost because of the prevalance of computers, email, and the internet. I started college right about the time email address became popular, so I have very few letters from my parents, but lots of lost emails. Then there is the vanity site that I created while I was in college, what about it? Once you leave the university they erase at, so what about all that history, will archeologist be able to dig through our old hard drives and blogs to figure us out, well while researching blog books, I discovered that someone had thought of that years ago and was actually doing something about it.
I found this in a comment on Lifehackers post about blog books.

airship
8:01 AM on Thu Mar 2 2006

Being a dinosaur from the age of paper myself (I was/am a magazine editor and book author), I might be inticed to print a nice softcover copy of my blog from time to time, just for ego-boosting browsing in my dotage. But as long as the Internet Arcive ( http://www.archive.org/ ) is active, it's really unnecessary. And like you say, the links won't work on paper. Maybe e-paper?

and guess what - check out these links. 1996 - M1997 - V1997 - B1996. Ok, so they were a little cheesy back then, we've come a long way - blogs can be so simple or complex, and so beautiful in just a few easy step. As for my website, I did create a much better one a few years later, and I do have it backed up on my personal computer.


Oh yea, I was going to tell you about turning your blog into a book. There are several companies that can download your blog, let you do a minimal amount of organization and then ship you a bound book complete with text, photos, and comments of your blog! Wow, anyone can be an author these days. There may not be book signings, and huge press runs, but just think, a book you actually wrote. I am seeing inspire, not require working here for encouraging my kids to write! Gone are the days, at least in my house, where construction paper books run supreme. Maybe it's because we are all perfectionist, or just computer junkies.

Lulu
Blurb

BlogCollector


Here's a great blog post on Turning your blog into a book.


Another neat discovery onlong these lines is FEEDJOURNAL. Finally I can have a daily newspaper that isn't full of lies, misquotes, distorted truths, and depressing stories. I can actually create a newspaper that is personalized to me, and contains writing by people that I know (ok, some only virtually) on topics that are of personal interest to me. Honestly, I probably won't use this very much - but I can easily print things off for Grandma this way.