Making a Blog Archive

I've been blogging since 2007, which I suddenly realize is a few years. And this blog is my only "journal" (well, for travel, I write the journal entries off-line first). So I decided it would be good to get a printed archive of my blog, just for safety, in case Blogger decided to close tomorrow.

I had experimented with one service already, but the book I created was more than 600 pages, and would cost a fortune to print. So I looked at a few other services, and I think I found something that will work for me.

I'm using BookSmart, which allows me to select which blog posts I want to include, and (in theory, at least) "slurps" the photos from those posts also. It doesn't always grab the photos, but I think that might be because many of the photos I post on the blog are actually stored in Photobucket, rather than directly on Blogger.

Anyway, I managed to finish the text for the 2007 archive. Pretty cool. I can import it into BookSmart, and then copy it into my word processing app (I use Mellel) and format it the way I like. I could go all the way to print with BookSmart, but the default is to put one entry per page, and there was a lot of wasted space. I wanted to make the text flow better.

It was interesting to see my posts from 2007. Sofia was just a toddler, and Micah a little kid with a lot of really weird Micah'isms. Very amusing to revisit "I'm going to pretend I'm Captain Jack Sparrow; do you want to be the dog?" and stories like the imaginary DVD player that was too loud...

We had a lovely Shabbat dinner last night with three other families, all very close friends. In fact, I think the 18 of us (including the kids) are all going to trek to the Florida panhandle for Passover this spring! We had a great time, good food, many bottles of wine for the grownups, and the kids watched The Parent Trap (the Lindsey Lohan version) and had fun with their friends. We didn't even get home until 11pm.

Which means Sofia and I woke at 8:30, just barely in time to get dressed, eat breakfast, and make it to her ballet class. She actually did REALLY well this morning, participating nearly the entire time. Very proud!

This afternoon we all went to "Pies on the Commons" in Framingham for a little while, and then met our friends at Walden Pond. The guys (my three and their two; the son is one of Micah's best buddies) walked all the way around the pond, but the mom and I were stuck walking with Sofia, which means that we made very little progress and finally turned back around. Sofia really just wanted to stay at the beach and throw stones into the water.

We went back to their house for dinner, and had another lovely evening. And got home earlier.

All are asleep now except me (it's 10:30). G'night!