New Addiction

I have a new addiction... Blurb. It's the website that will help make your blog into a book. They offer a free program called BookSmart that allows you to import your blog and edit it how you'd like, then send it off to print.

If you're considering making your blog a book one day and haven't already started, read this.

I have to warn you. I HATED BookSmart & Blurb at first. Hate may be a slight under-statement. It took me 8 attempts just to download the stupid program. Reading through their Help page I found I was far from the only person with this issue. And wow... there are millions of more issues others have too. The Blurb tech staff are not very helpful - and some are down right not so nice, according to other user comments. So I've stayed away from them. Although I did send them one nasty email. After the stupid program had crashed on me for the 300th time in an hour. Ok, thats a bit of a stretch, but I'll get to that in a moment...

Once you finally download and install the program, then it lets you import your blog rather easily. It imports the text & pictures in two different steps. If you have a lot of pics (I have over 800 apparently), this may take a while.

Then it asks you how you want your book populated. Do you want them to do it automatically? And if so, in what order - oldest to newest or vice versa. For my first attempt, I picked oldest to newest. And the blog entries on the left of the screen (the material you have to work with) were in order. But the actual book itself... seriously messed up!!! It went from Christmas to Nathan's birth to Halloween to Easter and back to New years. It was a disaster.

So I tried to delete the pages of the book and redo it in the order I wanted. Only there were OVER 400 pages!!!!!!!!!!! The website will tell you that their books can hold over a thousand blog entries. Now that I know the program, that could be true. If you used 4 columns on every page and each column was a different entry. And each entry was only 6 sentences long. Or if longer, in size 4 font.

I had 175 entries. And it filled more pages than Blurb allows in one book (440). But that was with them populating it automatically. Upon looking at it, I realized they try to stretch your blog out as big as possible, with each entry taking up 4-12 pages.

So I began deleting the book they created for me. One major pain in the neck problem. It will only let you delete one page at a time!!!! I found a shortcut to try to delete a few pages at a time, and each time I tried that, the program crashed!

So I started over with a new book, this time asking it NOT to populate the book for me, but stil to order the entries oldest to newest. Then I could drag them over to the book one at a time. And so thats what I'm doing.

And it's taking forever. At first, it took me about an hour to do one or two entries. No joke. Then I gave up on trying to format it exactly how I wanted it... Changing the font.... Oh what a headache!!!! You can do it. If you have the patience of a saint and three years to edit your blog book. Now that I'm in the swing of things, I do edit the fonts slightly - just so each entry is at least the same size. But changing from the default Georgia font is a nightmare. Oh yeah, and sometimes when you try, the program crashes.

The program crashes randomly... when you try to add punctuation... delete a blank line... delete more than one page at a time, etc, etc. And other times just for the fun of it. It took me about two days before I could get to the point where it doesn't crash 2 times a minute. That's when I sent a nasty email to the tech guys. They didn't respond.

The program has premade layouts for you to use to put your text & pictures into. Supposedly you can make your own layout, but I can't figure that out. So I use theirs. But its a waste of space. It only lets you put text in certain places and often leaves inches on the page blank. So you're forced to take up more pages per blog entry.

Pictures are the same. It has some creative layouts. But I wish there were more options.

Speaking of pictures... this is another giant headache. The pictures imported from your blog... VERY few of them are actually printable. I don't understand why blogger does this... but have you ever clicked on your pictures to see them bigger? Sometimes they're big, some times their huge and other times their tiny. I don't know why... even when all had been uploaded from the same camera, same settings and set to large on the blog uploader. So when you import them into your book, only a few are good enough quality to print. The book will warn you in a very clear way, if its not goo enough quality for the size you want.

So that means you need to go import your pictures to BookSmart from your harddrive. Hopefully you have them in an order that will help you with this. Because you have a few obstacles in your way... Namely BookSmart. At first I couldn't even get the "Import from my computer" to work at all. So I had to upload pictures to PhotoBucket and then download them into BookSmart. Talk about a pain. Especially when you have over 800 pics! But then miraculously "Import from my computer" started working. Only it won't show you thumbnails!!!! So I have to open the folder in another program, figure out what pics I want, then write down their numbers, head back to BookSmart and download them by number. It's time consuming, to say the least.

I downloaded this program out of curiousity. I knew I wanted to make a book - since the blog is basically Nathan's babybook. And I knew I wanted the book to end with the birth of his sister/brother. And I knew I'd have no time after the baby arrives to play with the program. I wanted to get books done for Christmas - for grandparent gifts. So I figured I'd start now while I had some free time. I figured I'd play with it now and in September make the book up to that point, then add in Octobers one at a time. I had no idea that I might have to start NOW in order to have it done by late October!!!

But I've managed to get addicted. Every free moment I have at home, I'm working on it. I've gotten 40 entries in the book so far. In a week's time - with every free moment spent on the program. And its taking up 100 pages. I had originally figured we'd have a 150-200 page book when all was done. That would keep the book at a reasonable cost of about $70 each. That's with a size of 8 x 11... bigger books cost way more.

But now that I've learned the program and see what reality is, knowing I have about 140 entries so far that are just about Nathan, and knowing that we have 3 more months of entries to come... I'm aiming to be under 320 pages. That's the cut off for $150. Ouch.

So if you're considering making your blog a book, may this be a warning. BookSmart is an awesome program with some pretty cool features, even though it still have potential to be much better. But it's no where near as easy as you're expecting. You have tons of edits to do - even if you hadn't planned on it. It's frustrating. It's time consuming. It's headache-inducing. And it's addictingly fun!

UPDATE!
I've spent the morning trying to figure out how to change layouts... and figured it out! I had an old version of the program. They released version 2.0 on Thursday. And with that, layouts can be customized - YAY!!! However, as cool as that is, I think the new version is 3 times slower than the old... if that can be believed... Maybe it's my computer. But I think its the program, too. Good luck with your book making!