Friday, December 26, 2008

Our Blook

This blog started out as somewhat of a half hatched notion of a good way to share a few pictures when Braedyn was born. A lot of our friends and family were spread out across the world and we wanted to share our joy with them in someway. It's ended up being an ongoing photo journal of our lives and especially of Braedyn's life. It's also ended up being our main photo album as we don't print a lot of pictures to make albums with. And with all the time and effort we have invested in the blog it always seemed like duplicated effort to create a photo album. Well one thing that has been on my mind to do for quite some time is to figure out a way to print out the blog in a nice format so that we do have a way to keep it around to flip through. About a year ago a friend of mine, Ben Martens, at Microsoft showed me a book that he just had made of his blog. So I set out to write a little piece of software that would suck in every blog post and then format them all correctly so that I could print our blog as well. I made the mistake of telling Talisha about this idea about a year ago and she has been excited about it ever since. Well the first installment of our "Blook" is now completed (by the time this posts Talisha will have received it as a Christmas present). I sent off the entire first year of our blog to Lulu.com for publishing in a hardback, 8.5" x 11", full color book. It is 635 pages long with over 1200 pictures in it. And guess what, you too can buy a copy! Just go to http://www.lulu.com/content/5177449 and order yours today. I think you get a discount if you order 10 of them! Anyhow, it will be nice to see how this turns out. Unfortunately it's a bit expensive to experiment so I'm not sure how the formatting will look until I actually get the first copy, so I'm sure there will be some improvements made in the formatting module of my code for next year's installment.

Oddly enough the picture on the front of the book was taken in Hawaii in 2006, not Carpinteria, since Braedyn was only 7 months at the time. Apparently the beach way of life had a pull on us before we even knew Carp existed. Funny the twists and turns life takes!

 
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2 comments:

BB said...

Mike,
What a great idea! I would love to hear how it turns out. Hope you guys had a wonderful California Christmas!! We have enjoyed watching Braedyn grow.

Michael, Kelly, Kai and Kale Hobbs said...

What a great idea! I've always wondered myself if there was a way to print out the blogs. It has been wonderful to watch Braedyn grow and learn from this great distance that we have. It seems like we haven't missed out on anything with your lives. Thank goodness for technology! You do such a great job with the blog too and I hope you know how much we enjoy reading and viewing it! We wish we could see you guys so that our little boys could play! They would be the best of friends! Have a wonderful new year and we hope you had a fantastic christmas in Iowa!