Tag: blogging

Where’s Treve 2022 In Print

My blog entries for the year 2022 are now in print. Much of the credit goes to my wife Joann. She’s become quite a book designer. We now have a stack of coffee table books that cover all the blog posts I’ve created since I started in 2015.

Initially we used the brute force method of recreating the posts in Adobe InDesign and then publishing the results using Blurb. This is quite time consuming.

In March of 2022, after publishing the collection for 2021, we thought we’d look for a more efficient method of publishing. We explored a variety of services that promised to turn a blog into a book. We selected two services, PixxiBook and Blog2Print, and sent our samples off for printing. In both cases the results were quite nice. We liked the layout of Blog2Print. We’ve also used Blub, Shutterfly, and MixBook for creating books, all with favorable results. For the blog, though, we wanted a service that would automatically import the content, allow for some editing, and produce a coffee table book.

When it came time to publish, we discovered that our chosen service Blog2Print was no longer compatible with WordPress. They responded to my inquiry with “…we are unable to pinpoint the issue caused when attempting to generate a book from your blog.” Lame!

Back to the drawing board to see what other services were available. We settled on Intorealpages.com. Their editing tools gave us quite a bit of flexibility. If you are planning on converting a blog to print you may want to consider how the service handles photos, hyperlinks and embedded content such as Youtube videos. We did some editing to adjust the placement of photos and to make sure that the content would make sense on a page in a book.

We ordered the book on January 9, and it arrived on January 26, being printed and shipped from the Netherlands. Hard cover, 112 pages covering 42 posts. We are quite pleased with the result.

Blog to Book

Not too long ago I found myself revisiting blog posts from the past year and thinking it would be fun to turn the posts into a book. To that end I asked my wife Joann if she would be interested in tackling the project. We started with a few posts from early 2018 and used those posts to put together a “proof” to see how the process would go. From there we decided to break the posts for 2018 into two volumes, each about 50 pages.

We looked at several options for creating the book and decided that Shutterfly seemed to be well suited to the task. We’ve used Blurb for past projects but the book building tools for Shutterfly are easier to use. We also looked at some of the options that let you import your blog content directly into a book, but those platforms seemed to compromise on the quality of the photos and have limited options for formatting. We wanted a book that would represent the content of the blog with high quality photos and the flexibility to deal with some complex formatting issues. Some blog posts have only one photo some have a dozen or so. Sometimes a post would just have a short paragraph and sometimes they’d ramble on.

Needless to say after two and half months of massaging text and pictures we hit the “publish” button. Two weeks later the books arrived. They are now on the coffee table, and it’s a treat so be able to pick up a book and revisit past adventures. Amsterdam, Africa, Santa Fe, Chicago, Frank Lloyd Wright, Kayaking around the San Francisco Bay Area.

I’m not sure if the books will be something the grandchildren find years from now when they’re sorting through dusty belongings, but I expect the books will outlast the bits and pixels of the blog once those have evaporated into the ether.