Sunday, November 16, 2008

A Snowy Sunday in Detroit

We're getting our first accumulating snowfall this afternoon. I've got a brief (20 second) video of it for you shot with my point and shoot camera. The view is through the bay window in my dining room. My little Vladi cat is in it too. (I obviously need an image stabilized camera for shooting video, sorry!) Anyway, this is for all my warm weather blogging buddies, Randy, Denise, Terry, Lori, Tex, Ruth, Steve, Colleen, Craig, Susan, Kathryn, and the rest of you who don't see snow very often...

I've been at work for hours on that book for my daughter. I'm discovering that book-designing is a lot like projects around the house... triple the amount of time you think it will take to get the job done and you'll be in the right ball park. I've finally got all the pictures picked out, edited, and placed in the templated pages of the book. I still have to write an introduction and put in all the captions. I expect that will take me a good couple of hours yet.

While I'm on the subject of creating books, here's a disappointing bit of news I have to share with you. If you're using Blogger or WordPress you can't "slurp" your blog to create a book at Blurb.com anymore :-(

Last year, at about this time, Thomas and I (Thomas did most of the work) sponsored an Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories carnival where we (a good handful of genea-boggers) wrote up our personal Christmas memories, one each day from December 1 till Christmas Day. It was a lot of work but also the most fun I had on my blog all year! I told myself that I would create a book of those blog posts and photos as a keepsake, using Blurb.com to make a short project of it.

Unfortunately, I procrastinated and that was a big mistake. Evidently last September Blogger and WordPress changed their APIs. So you can no longer "slurp" (directly upload your blog posts) from them to Blurb.com anymore. I guess Blurb.com has requested the new information from them to make the "slurp" process work again but they aren't playing nice and won't share. The bottom line is, you can only "slurp" LiveJournal and TypePad blogs.

You can still copy and paste all your text and photos to make a book of your blog posts at Blub.com but how daunting a task is that?! If I just hadn't procrastinated so long I would have had my book done. That's what I get!

OK, time to get back to working on that book for my daughter...