Adding 'publisher' to my resume ... (I kid, I kid)

With Father's Day fast approaching I thought I'd give you all a preview of what the dad in this house will (hopefully*) be getting from Blurb come the third Sunday in June. I say "hopefully" because my cheap thrifty ways may thwart this goal since I refused to pony up the 20 smackeroos for speedy shipping.

The lovely and talented (and really and truly published) Binky from 24/7 turned me on to the idea earlier in the year when she posted about her experience creating a book for The Partner's birthday.

Back then I had been trying to get a Blurb book going as kind of an official hard-copy record of this here site, you know should something happen in the technical universe that slurps all this stuff off the page forever? But it was SO Slllllllllooow.

I had e-mailed Binky to see if she could walk me through the subtleties of Blurb's interface.

Turns out she used the good old cut and paste method while I tried the less than eloquent "slurp" feature. Slurp, in a word, sucked.

So I revised my objectives and decided to break in Blurb by making a much smaller book for Jed celebrating Father's Day. (Don't worry, he won't likely see the book before it arrives in our mailbox because he doesn't read these here ramblings of mine).

Blurb was still slow, but it worked. The photos were a little easier to work with than the text, but all in all the process wasn't that painful. I was a little shocked at how little I've written about my husband that HE would appreciate (hense why he likely doesn't read here) but I was kind of glad, too. Working with text was pretty clunky and on occasion made me want to push the laptop off the couch.

The best news, I guess, is that once I started working with it it seemed to get easier. I realized how long things would take to upload. I knew not to upload too much, and to have folders ready with images. I also learned that when text overflowed onto textboxes on the next page, editing in the original page didn't necessarily make it go away on the overflow box. Cutting without pasting was necessary. In other words, it forced me to be somewhat organized.

I was getting so comfortable with it that I made another book. For my dad.

Now, I can't tell you how they turned out just yet, (remember I'm too cheap for anything except parcel post atop the slowest of slow moving snails) but I thought if you were willing to take a risk (and aren't adverse to shelling out for a more speedy delivery) you might want to just throw caution to the wind this Father's Day.