Family History, Photos, Blogs, and Books
13 November 2007 16:21

Each week my wife writes up a little narrative about what happened in our family during the preceeding week, which she sends this out to family and friends. The most recent edition of the "family newsletter" included details about our recent family trip to Moab for a storyteling job, and some rockhounding.

I got to thinking yesterday how nice it would be if there were some kind of tool that would allow us to write up these weekly narratives, attach photos and such, and blog-like, publish it (securely) to family and friends. Going one step further, it would be nice if at the end of each year we could then bind up all the weekly newsletters from the past year into a (acid-free, archival-quality) hardbound book whch we could give to each of our kids, and keep for posterity.

The key here is efficiency. Time is such a precious commodity these days, and anything that can minimize the effort to maintain a meaningful narrative of the events of our family is worth pursuing.

Are there tools out there that can provide an "end-to-end" experience in doing this? As I thought about it I could see combining Picasa + Blogger + Blurb. One problem I immediatey ran into with that combo was Picasa only allows you to attach 4 photos to a blog post (what's up with that???). Another potential problem would be the resolution of the photos when moving them to a book format. I assume Picasa resizes images apporiately when publishing them with Blogger, but the added resolution is a necessity to get a high-quality print job on paper. Is there a single tool out there that can do this?

Any suggestions? My guess is the tool or a combination of tools is out there, I just need to find it.