February 12, 2016

Blog Post #5400


Yesterday I received my hardcover albums made from my 2015 blog entries. I used Blog2Print to upload my blog and make an attractive book. Since I had so many photos, it went over the limit of 430 pages so I had to get it split into two books, one for January to June and another for the rest of the year. This was an expensive project but to me it's worthwhile because it doubles as a family album as well as saving the blog for posterity.

I don't subscribe to the belief that anything you post online will last forever. Why should it?
Example: In the early days of AOL, I took advantage of their website hosting and created several sites. Later they stopped offering hosting services and notified members that the sites would go away. I transferred some of my pages* to paid hosting services and copied others to one of my backup drives. The latter group disappeared from the internet. They weren't particularly valuable anyway. 
Since I put a tremendous amount of time into this blog, I like to preserve it to look at later and leave for my children. Although my digital photos are backed up on various hard drives, they would be hard for me to find. Most of them are also stored on my Shutterfly account and on yearly archive CD's, but without the descriptions that are on this blog.

I've been making these books for ten years. The paper is high quality and the color rendition is good.  After the book is automatically generated, I delete the table of contents (don't need it), page through the online draft to see if anything else should be left out, and add full-size images to the front and back. 
* My oldest websites are Javins.com, CivilWarFieldTrips.com, and VirginiaPhoto.com. They have evolved since the AOL days, although I tend to neglect them now that I have a blog.


7 comments:

  1. That's great that you have these volumes for yourself but also for future generations to enjoy. They look like they are well done.

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  2. I had an old blog years ago that blogger deleted. Not sure why they did it.

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  3. Wow! What a great idea. I will check it out. I do have several folders with all my uploaded blog shots. The problem may be that they were all submitted a lower resolution for posting... that could certainly impact the quality of the prints...sigh.. Were you images hi res.?

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    Replies
    1. No, except for the cover photos. For my blog I use images between 30k and 70k. I save larger versions of all favorite pictures at 500k or more so I can print enlargements if I want.

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