One of the most common requests we hear from Kidlee users is “How can I print out my posts?”

Since Kidlee’s humble beginning, you’ve always had the ability to download a data export file of your posts in spreadsheet format. While this was a nice way to ensure your data was portable, it wasn’t that pretty to look at. And until recently, it didn’t even provide export support for your photos. (it does now, yea!)

On the flip side, other sites provide the option to format and customize beautiful hardback cover books with glossy pages and full page photos. While these books are fantastic keepsakes (and we still may consider offering them in the future), charging you $25-50 simply to have a printed book seemed like a bit too much.

Enter the Kidlee Memory Book

Kidlee Memory Books are simple to create and print yourself, at anytime – and the best part is they are FREE! Your books are created as downloadable PDFs, and include your photos too. Your posts are nicely arranged in a chronological timeline, just like they are shown online and in your mobile app.

Kidlee Memory Books is currently in beta testing. We invite you to give it a spin and create your first Kidlee Memory book now! And please let us know what you think. We’d love to hear how we can make it better!

Bonus for Kidlee Plus accounts: If you are a Kidlee Plus subscriber, you can create custom Memory Books for individual kids if you like. This way, you can have separate books for each child. In addition, you can choose a custom date range in order to include a certain set of posts in your book.

We are excited to announce that all Kidlee users can now add photos to posts. Free accounts have 500Mb of space available for photos, while Kidlee Plus accounts enjoy a whopping 5Gb of photo upload bliss – so start adding your pictures today!

In addition, all users now have the ability to indicate which posts to keep Private (not share with Followers), as well as the ability to edit the dates of posts. This is great when you forget to enter a post or you want to input a bunch of posts from the past to build out your memory timeline.

We’re working hard on a few more new updates and features, so stay tuned!

Are you on Pinterest yet? It’s quickly become our go to source for inspiration of just about any kind. Whether you’re looking for a good crockpot recipe or ideas for kids’ outdoor furniture, Pinterest is brimming with beautiful photos and creative ideas.

We just started a Kidlee account on Pinterest, and our first Board is “Kids Quotes.” We’ll be rounding up some of the funniest kids quotes to share with our Followers. We’ll be creating more boards soon, so we invite you to come follow us on Pinterest! If you need an invitation to join Pinterest, just send a note to elaina (at) kidlee (dot) com and I’d be happy to request an invite for you!

It’s been a wonderful and busy year for us here at Kidlee. We continued to grow with the introduction of our new iPhone app, which gives users the ability to easily save and share their kids’ quotes, milestones and memories on the go.

In the spirit of celebration and thanks, we’re happy to offer a free upgrade for Kidlee Plus users to gift a friend.When you upgrade to Kidlee Plus for $19 per year, you will also receive one additional Kidlee Plus upgrade to give to a friend.

By upgrading to Kidlee Plus, your Kidlee experience will be enhanced with these additional features:

• Write longer posts – up to 500 characters
• Add photos to each post
• Back-date your posts
• Mark posts as Private
• Customized email frequency for followers

To take advantage of this offer, just sign up for Kidlee Plus, then send the email address of your friend to kidlee (at) kidlee (dot) com, and we will upgrade their account to Kidlee Plus as well. (Your friend must first sign up for a free Kidlee account.)

If you’re already a Kidlee Plus user, just send us the email address of the friend you’d like to upgrade. Please make sure they’re a registered Kidlee user first.

Thanks for a great year and best wishes for 2012!

Photo from a thousand words

School has started. Hooray! So have the stacks of artwork started coming home in folders and backpacks at your house yet? We love seeing our kids’ imaginations in full color display — and we especially dig hearing what they have to say about the art work. It’s just as imaginative, if not more so, than the art itself. We used to take notes on the back of their art, to remember the fantastic descriptions and stories behind each piece.

The only problem is the amount of space the art takes up. So many people are using technology to snap and save the artwork in digital form, then making great prints like these, showcasing lots of tiny art pieces all together.

We like to use Kidlee to capture our kids’ art AND to type in the things our kids tell us about the art. Then, when we get our act together, we plan to create some frame- worthy digital art with the images AND the captions.

Here’s even more inspiration:

photo from janeleni.com

Thanks to Arizona Foothills Magazine for featuring Kidlee in their August issue! We’re longtime fans of AFM, and it’s always a treat to get it in our mailbox each month. They consistently showcase awesome local businesses, so we’re very flattered to be in such good company! Want to see a close-up of our debut in a real glossy magazine?

We love that AFM is available in an online format that you can flip through page by page just like the real magazine. Check it out here.

My business cards arrived today! Aren’t they shiny and pretty? We added a QR code on the back that links to our iPhone app download page. Yes, the QR code looks kind of huge. But the important thing is, we scanned it and it works!

My son asked me at bedtime last night if he could have some of the cards to put in his backpack “in case anyone wanted more information about Kidlee.” I love it — a marketer at age 7!

I’ll be handing lots of these out next week at the BlogHer ’11 conference in San Diego. It’s a gathering of thousands of bloggers, and the companies who want to connect with these bloggers. I’m looking forward to meeting a lot of new people, and spreading the word about Kidlee. In fact, we’re going to have a special promotion for people who sign up for a free Kidlee account during the conference (August 4-6). Stay tuned for more details!

One of our favorite blogs is Design Mom. We love the constant flow of beautiful products and wonderful ideas. Last week, Gabrielle (aka Design Mom) wrote about her idea to have her kids write letters to their future selves. Essentially, it’s a way for the kids to keep a journal, but instead of writing in a book, they send e-mails to special e-mail accounts set up for this purpose. This way, their thoughts are kept private (as opposed to keeping a blog), they can add photos if they like,  and as they get older, they’ll be able to look back and read about their thoughts and dreams as kids.

Being passionate keepers of our family memories, of course we love this idea. When our kids get a little older, we think it would be a great idea to let them sit down with their own Kidlee accounts and journal away to their hearts’ content.

photo from Design Mom

We’re oh so happy to share some recent Kidlee buzz! First, we were reviewed by the iPhone mom, and she thought Kidlee was great! She found Kidlee to be a “quick and easy way to ease scrapbooking-baby book guilt”.  She was also a big fan of Kidlee Plus, our upgraded version that lets users write longer posts, add photos and more. She recommended that parents take advantage of our 30-day money-back guarantee and try out Kidlee Plus for a month to see if they like it. We think that’s a pretty smart idea too! Read the full article here.

Kidlee was also featured in articles in the Arizona Republic and Arcadia News. We’d give you links, but it doesn’t look like the articles are online. It’s been fun running into parents  who are telling us they read about Kidlee and are now using it to track their quotable kids and share stories with out of town grandparents.

We’re going to continue to spread the word about Kidlee, and we ask our happy users to do the same! Come “like” us on Facebook here and follow us on Twitter (@gokidlee). Thanks so much!

Today is the day! You can now go to the AppStore and download the free Kidlee Baby Book & Family Journal app for iPhone and iPod touch. It’s located under iTunes>AppStore>Lifestyle>Free and you have our personal invitation to try it out!

The iPhone app is designed to complement our existing Kidlee.com web app by letting you save your memories on the go. You never know when those funny quotes or special moments are going to happen — and most likely you’re not sitting in front of your computer when they do.

With Kidlee for iPhone and iPod touch, you can tap in your memory on the spot, and it will be automatically synched with your Kidlee.com account. The Kidlee mobile app works best when used together with the web app found at www.kidlee.com. Log in to www.kidlee.com for additional features and to adjust your account settings.

After you’ve downloaded the mobile app and tried it out, we would absolutely love it if you could take a minute to write a review in the AppStore to let other parents know what you think. As always, please let us know what you think too — by e-mailing us at admin (at) kidlee (dot) com or leaving a comment here or on our Facebook page.

Thank you – and we hope you enjoy the new Kidlee mobile app!!