Wordle {Love}

Last year my SIL, Rebecca, introduced me to wordles and I fell in love with the 'toy.' Here is what wordle generated for our 2009 blog. Happy wordling!

Blurb blurb blurb......

I am putting on the finishing touches of my blurb blog book...for 2007!  Wow, what a process...my editing fingers are tired--isn't there some sort of new diagnosis for tired fingers from texting and typing?

For those that don't know, visit blurb.com and upload their software to your computer, and you can then slurp up your blog to the software and go to town creating a book out of all of your great entries and photos... it wasn't working with blogger for a while, but now it is... so go slurp!

What I learned is that I don't post enough pictures on my blog (thus, the last entry of Vivie's faces)...I'm way too selective in what I share compared with the amount of photos that I take.  I had to go through my photo files and add quite a few photos to my 2007 book to make it more complete.

I also learned that all the cutesie layouts and storyboards I've been doing lately and uploading to flickr don't really work wonderfully with the blurb pre-set page layouts.  They are too low-res to work in the blurb book, so when I do my '08 book I will need to go back to my original files and upload from there.  You can also upload from picasa and some other hosts, which is nice.  If I created my layouts in a full-bleed size for the 10x8 landscape book I chose, it might work, but I'm not so sure I like a cutesie scrapbook-like blog book anyhow... 

***(note--you can upload from flickr if you use that as your photo storage and sharing tool, but what I'm talking about is the storyboards I upload to flickr and then to my blog that are 12x12)

However, using photoshop to change my photos to enhance or edit them works very well, perhaps with a little bit of journaling right on the photo, as I sometimes do.  The photos should be 300 dpi...that is the most important thing for a nice printout.  

The blurb pages are not customizable at this time (layouts are preset) and therefore, so are the photo/text layout sizes.  A lot of my time in editing this was cropping photos in photoshop at 300 dpi to the dimensions of the photo layouts I chose in the book.  

I also found that rather than using their preset stripes and other designed backgrounds, it looked cleanest and sharpest using one preset background color with different photo and text layouts. After tinkering with some different layouts and backgrounds, I ended up used a black background with white text for a uniform look throughout the book.  

You can add page ornaments on top and bottom, as well as borders around your photos in blurb.  It spices it up just enough to end up with a clean yet sophisticated and sharp book about your family!

Once my blurb layouts were complete I had 126 pgs for my blog from October-December 2007 alone... my layouts were quite a bit of TEXT... I learned that I am definitely NOT short, sweet, & to the point with my writing style.  And I decided that to keep 2007 to itself and to make it comprehensive.  Since I started my blog so late in the year, I added in my '07 photos prior to blogging (including enough of Vivie to show her story by photos alone), since it was a pretty important year.  So I'm ending up with 162 pages for 2007.

I'm going to make a separate book with ALL of Vivie's photos to tell her story, including all of my email entries and journal entries that I wrote while in the hospital as well as her updates throughout those vital first months.

What a process...  and I'm sure blurb will only become more customizable in time.  But for now, if you keep it under 160 pages, you can choose the option of a silk 100 lb. paper which I'm told prints up super nice.  Mine is 162 pages, so I'm going to have to cut out somewhere!  For 121-160 pages 10x8 landscape, hardcover with silk finish paper, the cost is just over $60 with shipping. It's about $15 less for a soft cover.  My friend had a great idea of getting a hardbound (with a dust-jacket) to keep nice and clean, as well as a soft-bound specifically for the kids to enjoy. 

Now, I'm on to 2008, and thinking I am going to be BUSY for a long while putting together books.  My digital photos need a home so that the kids can see their lives and we can enjoy the stories these pictures will tell.  I'm going to try out the Mac books....what have your experiences been with shutterfly and any other digital photo book brands?