Blogger of the month: 78MPH
Guest Post by Colleen O'Shea
Here at Into Real Pages, we see a lot of different kinds of blogs, and bloggers. But this week, we gained a Canadian customer who is quite extraordinary. Here's the story of 81-year-old Maureen O'Shea and her blog, 78 MPH.
Maureen and her blogbooks, created @ intorealpages.com
My mom, Maureen O'Shea, has been a blogger for the past 5 months. We started her blog, 78 MPH, to document a road trip she was going to take with one of her friends. I convinced her to start the blog: I ghost write for several companies and run a couple of blogs myself, so I helped her brainstorm for a name, and then heped with the set-up and editing of her WordPress blog.
I suggested a blog because I thought it might be more fun for her than just writing a diary for herself or posting photos on Facebook. A blog would let her share to others outside her circle, let her upload pictures of people she meets and include them in her stories and then let them know about where they could see them with a cool, easy-to-remember URL so they could come and read about themselves. And come they did - with over 11,000 visits and 200 comments in a relatively short amount of time.
She had to go through a learning curve, of course - in the beginning, I would need to remind her to take her iPad with her to take pictures before she would go somewhere – and to make sure she would write down people's names and email addresses so she wouldn't get them wrong. That routine has paid off: she's very good at it now. She even has a Twitter handle - @sevenpars - a tribute to a day when she had one of her best rounds of golf ever! My mom is a very modern 81-year-old, that's for sure!
My mom lives in the city of Calgary, Alberta but the road trip started at Sauble Beach, Ontario on the shores Lake Huron. The two-week trip with her friend Ruth turned into a month-long adventure that eventually took these two #ActiveSeniors back to Alberta through the USA, where they did sightseeing, visited friends, sampled local specialties and played quite a few rounds of golf along their 3,200 km. road trip. My mom would post new stories every couple of days, and she was always on the lookout for a place with free WiFi so she could research, upload and post. It kept her even busier than her normal busy self.
Once she was back in Calgary, Maureen kept writing - about getting older, about being an active senior – and her biggest passion, golf. Friends of the family would call me and tell me how great it was that I was helping my mom do this, and some of them even think the blogging has made her even sharper mentally than she was before she began. All I know for sure is she's like a tiger, always on the hunt for something to write about, and that's very impressive.
At the beginning of November, we published our 78th post and to celebrate, my mom wanted to put her blog into a book form. I found that Into Real Pages supports WordPress blogs and we tried it out. It was really easy to compile and then we could actually visualize what 78 MPH would look like in book form. We tried all the different formats available to us - 1-, 2- and 3-columns, with and without additional artwork - and we finally decided on a format that she loved.
"I decided I wanted all the comments that people had put on my posts, that was important for me and Into Real Pages let me add them. Before compiling my book for the last time, I put out a post telling people I was doing this and I gave them a few days to post a comment, if they wanted. That way, those comments will be a part of my book forever," she says. "And they are!"
Because we were able to track the shipment, my mom knew as soon Canadian Customs had cleared her package and was on the truck for home delivery. She was so excited. I got a Facebook call from her as soon as her shipment arrived and watched her as she unpacked her books.
"I'm tickled pink!" she said. "It's just like it looks like on the site. I couldn't be happier!"
You can read Maureen's account of putting her blog into book form here: http://78mph.com/2015/11/the-books-arrived/