blog -> baby book

On our way to Moab a few weeks ago we broke up the drive by spending a night in Silverthorne. This gave us the chance to finally give my parents their belated Christmas gift. I took the first six months of this blog and turned it into a book using a service offered by blurb.com. In general I was happy with the service and the end quality of the books was really impressive. However, it was a ridiculous amount of work to do the layout and formating (I knew it would be but the marketing folks at blurb try and make it sound simple). The big problem was that something happened to the books in shipping and we didn't get them in time for Christmas. I don't know if this was blurb's fault or UPS's but once they were notified of the problem blurb was very responsive - they reprinted the books and expressed shipped them to us.

LT seemed to like reading about himself (you can kind of make out me and E-Faz in that picture in the book - probably from this old post).

How many nine month olds have their picture on a book cover? OK, so these days there are probably a lot but such a thing would have been unheard of when I was a kid so I think it's pretty darn cool.

Below is the preface/intro I wrote for the book (with a few typo's and spelling errors corrected but I'm sure there are still some in there!)


Preface

A few months before Landon was born I decided to start a blog for him. I figured it would be an easy way to share pictures with Family. I thought maybe I'd use it for the birth announcement. Beyond that, I didn't have any plans to make much use of it.

We'd picked the name 'Landon Tanner Campbell' early in Kari's pregnancy but wanted to keep the name a secret (to avoid hearing people's opinions on the name - no one will tell you they don't like a name after a baby is born but for some reason there's no hesitation before). So we saddled him with the nickname of 'LT' and told everyone it stood for 'little tyke' until he was born and we revealed that LT had been his actual initials all along. The name of the blog then was, "LT's Blog" which now is also the title of this book. The nickname LT hasn't caught on as I'd expected (though recently gaining some traction) so I thought I should give a little background on it just in case it disappears in the coming years.

On June 5th of 2007 LT came into this world. I did post the birth announcement on the blog along with a few pictures. Then I posted a few more pictures. Then I started to write a little bit with the pictures. The blog starting building up a momentum all its own and before long people I never would have expected were telling me they enjoyed reading it. So I kept at it and even Kari contributed a few posts. In early October I added online advertising to the blog site and, to date, have earned almost four whole dollars towards LT's college fund (hey, it's a start, right?).

The blog has become a sort of modern day baby book (I'm sure by the time LT is old enough to read and appreciate the blog that statement will seem humorously out of date). I'm using a free service - www.blogger.com - to host the site and who knows what will happen to it in the future (Google owns it so it doesn't seem like it's going anywhere anytime soon but that too will probably seem funny and ridiculously dated some day). So we wanted to convert the blog into a tried and true medium - a good old hard cover book. Kari found some web site that promised to automatically 'slurp' up the content of your blog, lay it out into a book and print it in bookstore quality. The service did do the automatic content download and did lay it all out for me but it's taken me untold hours to redo the layout and formatting into something that actually looks half decent (interestingly enough I just turned down a job offer to work for a company that deals with a very similar issue of converting online content into nicely formatted print content complete with targeted advertising. So I have some insight into the difficulty of the problem and wasn't too surprised that it took a lot more work than advertised to get the book formatted properly). At the time of writing I don't yet know about their 'bookstore quality' printing but I'm hopeful (particularly after all this work!) that the end result will be nice.

For the most part the content of this book is true to the original content of the blog which at the time of writing can be found at http://landon-t-c.blogspot.com/. Some links to other web sits have been removed (just doesn't work as well in hardcopy) and links back to previous blog entries have been replaced with page number references. A few pictures have been added and a few removed in the occasional attempt to improve the layout. Largely, however, what follows in the pages of this book were taken verbatim from the 167 entries to LT's blog made during his first six months of life.

Brian David Campbell
(now better known as LT's dad)
December 8, 2007