Printing the Blog

I have had lots of people ask me about this recently and promised to post the info. See those 4 folders on shelf? I finally got the blog printed! There are several online sites that will print and bind your blog into a book but I never found one I liked due to formatting issues (and cost!). We started blogging at the end of 2007 so there was a lot of blog to print!
After looking at all the options I ended up using blog2print. Uploading your blog will take just a few minutes and then you’ll see several printing options. I chose to pay $7.95 per year and have the blog emailed to me as a PDF file instead of having it printed by their company. Again, personal preference but if they print it, and your blog is like ours with specific text under specific pictures, the formatting changes so your pictures don’t line up with your text (ie – all the photos upload in one column and the text is in another column. If you had more pictures or text than the other then the longer portion continues on to the next page. Does that make sense?) I didn’t want to go back and delete/rearrange 4+ years of blog so I chose the PDF and the emailed file looks exactly like the blog does online.
We researched printing options and a friend was able to print at her office and we just paid her per page. Talk about a good friend! I selected and shipped her paper (this one is a thicker and better for photos than regular paper), then gave her a flash drive with the files. She printed everything and I handed her a check. So easy (well, maybe not for her! Thanks again a TON, Erin!)
Total cost, based on how many books/pages we needed (4 books, approx. 1200 pages), was over $800 on the cheapest blog printing website I found. Ouch! If you printed each year it wouldn’t be as painful as doing 4 years at a time. However, if $200+ per year still didn’t get you what you wanted then that seems like a REALLY REALLY expensive option. I ordered enough paper to print this year’s blog too. So, when it is all said and done we will have spent $215 to order PDFs and paper, printed and purchased binders for 5+ years of blog books….compared to the $1000+ it would have been to have an online company print and bind the same thing.
What else? I took all the pages to Office Depot and punched holes for free and am making my own cover for the front of each binder. You could print the pages yourself and then have an office supply store bind them into a book for you if you don’t like the binder idea.  I ended up thinking that if they were in a binder and the girls ever grow up and want their own copy then I can just run it through a copier as many times as I need (of course, who knows if copiers and paper will exist in 20 years?!?!?).
Obviously it took years to get this done, partly because I wasn’t sure how I wanted to do it. It was expensive and what happens when there is 1 printed book and 3 kids? And, let’s be honest, I type these entries at night – I started this post at 4:30am – there are lots of grammar/spelling issues that spell check doesn’t catch and I don’t have time to go back and proof every entry (don’t we think Jared should do that?!?!). If there were more hours in the day I’d ideally write a post, save it and edit it later…but we way too quickly run out of hours around here!
Lots of times I beat myself up because (before I was a parent) I just knew my kids would have awesome scrapbooks every year and fabulous photo albums to document their lives. After being a mom for about 2 months I decided that if we all survived to adulthood/old age without starving or being overcome by dust in the house then life was going to be great! Just kidding…sort of! Now, as I put the printed blog into binders and looked at them all together I ended up giving myself a pat on the back. Sure, there are misspelled words, grammar mistakes and events left out, there are unflattering pictures of all of us and sometimes too much unnecessary information. However, blogging is a lot of work and those 1200 pages represent a LOT of missed sleep while documenting our lives. We may not have perfect baby scrapbooks, and maybe the girls won’t ever care to look back through these posts again. However, I can close my eyes and imagine that, if nothing else, Jared and I will sit 30 years from now flipping through the pages, laughing and crying looking back through these years. So, here’s to more years of blogging - spelling mistakes, ugly pictures and all! Now go get yours printed, if you wait until it is perfect you’ll never get it done!