February Relief Society Activity: Journals

I apologize for the lack of pictures.  I will try to remember them in the future!

Our Relief Society activity on February 11th was wonderful.  The topic was journaling.  We had three speakers.

First up was Spring, returning to our ward as a guest speaker.  She talked about some of her family's history of journaling and told some fun stories about some of her ancestors.  Then she talked about how she got into blogging as a way of journaling.  If you already have a blog, you can turn your blog into a book.  The website Spring uses is Blurb.com.  Here are her instructions:

First, choose the tool you want to use to create your book.  You may have to do some downloading.

Second, you will be directed to choose the size of your book.  Pricing information is available on this page.  This is also where you choose the title/author of the book.

Third, choose your layout.  You can use one of their starter layouts or create it on your own.  If you select "blog to book", it will give you a page to choose your blog service and your login information so they can directly download the information from your blog.  From there, it will identify your blog and you verify that it is correct.  All of your entries are then retrieved by the system, and a list of your postings will come up.  you can choose which entries to include in your book.  (Note from Jenna, having done many blog books myself using this website, comments that people have made will not show up in your book and obviously if your blog is comprised of a lot of videos, you may want to revise and include pictures too so they can be put into the book)

Fourth, you can select photos from your computer or certain photo sites to add to your book (another note:  the blog to book option will slurp all of your photos from your blog posts to the book, so you won't have to find those on your computer again to put them in the book).

Your book will be presented in editing format.  Edit away!  (Jenna would highly recommend editing and compiling pages that consist of your blog entry plus all the photos that you can put on one page because these books get expensive the longer they are--an 80 page book is about $50).  When you are finished editing, you can click on Order Book.  Just a few bits of verification and your book will be on the way!

Next up was Barbara Davis talking about her experience with journaling.  She included quotes about journaling that she got from the church website.  To see those quotes, follow this link.

Barbara showed us many of her journals and talked about what to write about.  She talked about writing about the things her kids did, including the birth stories, and of her grandkids.  She also told us about typing her journals on the computer, printing the pages out and gluing them into her journals because it's so much faster than writing.  She shared her testimony of journaling.

Last, we heard from Carie Jones' 17-year-old niece, whose name escapes me.  She shared her testimony of journaling also, and it was a beautiful testimony.

If you have more questions about journaling or blogging, I'm sure that Barbara Davis and Spring would be happy to help.  I am also available if you have questions about blogging or creating a blog book.