Fortunately, there are a couple services that will let blog owners print a book from the material and pictures hosted on blogs.

Blog2Print

One site is called Blog2Print which uses your blog login information to access your blog posts and pictures.  You can then organize the blog posts, pictures, etc. and create your book.

I’m not a fan of letting other websites have access to login information from different accounts, so my suggestion is to change your blog password before and then after you use the service.

Pricing for Blog2Print is about what you’d expect for self-created picture book.  If your blog has hundreds and hundreds of posts that you think will probably fill up a number of printed books at large cost, you could try their feature of priting to a PDF.  You could then take the PDF and have it printed somewhere else.

Blog2Print Website

Blurb BookSmart

With BookSmart by Blurb you download software to your computer that helps you organize the information from you blog.  You can then create your book.  Pricing is pretty good with this option, but you will need to install the software on your computer.

If you have a lot of posts which would equate to a lot of pages which in turn would mean more costly a book, try creating your book with the Black and White option.  The prices are much lower compared to the color books.  Save color for your printed photos if you’re planning to use your blog and print it as a journal.

BookSmart really does provide a rather wonderful selection of book types and pricing options which makes their service quite competitive.

Blurb Website

Other Book Printing Websites

There are other websites that you can use to print books but that don’t have the integration to pull information from your blog in an integrated and easy way (that we could find at least):

Lulu (a great service)

Lulu is a major printer/publisher.  If you have your book ready, Lulu can print your book, allow you to sell it from their or your own website.  Another great thing about Lulu is that you can start by purchasing just one copy of your book, but if you want more copies later, they can print it up.  It’s print on demand.

Lulu Website

MyPublisher

MyPublisher is used often for photo books.  You can receive discounts for MyPublisher by searching for MyPublisher Coupons on the Internet.  If you have a Costco membership, you might be able to get a discount as well (at least you could in the past from the Costco website).

MyPublisher Website

BookSurge by Amazon

BookSurge is similar to Lulu but integrates very well with Amazon.com if you are looking to sell your book/journal online (maybe you’re a movie star and lots of people want to read it or something).

BookSurge Website

No matter which option you choose, be selective of the types of posts you put into your book.  If your blog features more pictures of your cat than it does of you or your family, your family might not get as big of a kick out of reading the book.  So, keep the content interesting and original, and you’ll have a great book!

Many online family tree programs do a great job in organizing your family tree, but sometimes they can be a little slow loading page after page of family tree information and can only display a limited number of generations at any one point in time.

Geni provides an easy to use interface for entering your family tree.  Start with yourself and then click the yellow arrows to add parents, siblings, spouses, and children.

With Geni, you don’t have to go to a new page to add a new individual, a small prompt appears when you want to add a new individual. You can add additional information later.

Geni lets you easily zoom in or out on your entire family tree.

You can pan by clicking and dragging the items on the screen to view different portions of your tree. You can also choose different views of your tree.  You can you a list of individuals in your tree. If you’ve entered dates for your individuals, see events on the calendar view for the individuals.  Use the Map view to see where the members of your family tree come from.

Use the collaboration feature to work with friends and family to expand your family tree.

There are many family tree options available; give Geni a try or explore other options.

A new tool called Family.Show was recently developed as a demonstration of the capabilities of a programing format. The application is pretty cool to work with and you can export what you create to a standard Gedcom file which is a file format compatible with almost all family tree programs.

Family.Show offers a 3D-like view of your family tree. Instead of boxes with connecting lines to show your family history, Family.Show displays icons that look like people and progresses up and down instead of left to right like most family history programs. You can zoom in or out to see the whole tree or just a portion.

Family.Show also lets you view complex family tree structures unlike any other program. It’s easy to make sense out the visual representation if a person was married, then divorced, but had children in both relationships.

The program is free to download. It is possible that you may need to be running the latest version of your operating system for the program to work. Using Windows Vista, the program installed without any problems at all.

Family.Show comes with an example family tree (the Royal Family of England) so you can get a feel for how the program can handle complex family structures.

Family.Show can be downloaded at: http://www.vertigo.com/familyshow.aspx