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Life's too short to spend clicking "Next" – Introducing PageZipper

4 Comments December 16th, 2008 by Jonathan

Are you ever frustrated by websites which force you to click “Next” over and over again to get the next page in an article or the next image in an image gallery?  Next links chop up the flow of what you reading, and constantly leave you staring at that hourglass cursor waiting for the next page to load. PageZipper is a bookmarklet which automatically adds all the “Next” pages to the page you are on, so you don’t have to click “Next” and you certainly don’t have to wait for any pages to load.

Try it out: http://www.printwhatyoulike.com/pagezipper

PageZipper automatically finds the Next link on a page- you don’t need to tell it anything. As you scroll to the bottom of a page, it will append the next page to the bottom of the page you’re on. You can also click Control-Down Arrow to skip directly to the top of the next page. On image galleries, Control-Down Arrow will skip you directly to the next image in the gallery.

The original idea for PageZipper came from the brilliant Mr. Paul Davis who is working on a project similar to PrintWhatYouLike at http://github.com/PeeDee/webstrip/ and has a super-cool blog here: www.technologyinvestment.info

Eventually the code behind PageZipper will be integrated into PrintWhatYouLike.  Imagine printing Time’s list of the 50 best websites of 2008. You would have to individually print each one of the 50 web pages!! That would take hours, not to mention waste entire forests worth of paper.  But PrintWhatYouLike will soon have a solution- Instead imagine loading the first page of the list into PrintWhatYouLike.  Use the PrintWhatYouLike tools to remove all the ads and format the page to look just how you want.  Then click an “Extend Series” button. This button will use the PageZipper code to retrieve the other 49 webpages in the best websites list, apply your chages from the first page to each of those pages, and append those pages to your first page. The result will be one document which contains all 50 articles in the ‘best websites’ list, and looks exactly how you want. You could then print this as one print job or save it as one pdf. If you were using the plugin, you could close it and read the entire list all as one page.  That is where PrintWhatYouLike is headed.

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4 Comments Add your own

  1. Dave says:

    hello,

    is it possible to allow add page to be more functional and add more than one page in one go…as in

    http://www.techcrunch.com
    http://www.crunchgear.com

    or seperate adding in one line via something like http://www.techcrunch.com;www.google.com etc

  2. Jonathan says:

    Thats a good idea! I’ll add it soon. Probably there will be a small ‘more[+]’ link which you can click to get additional forms fields to enter urls

  3. ABe says:

    Love both PWYL & PZ.
    If you want suggestions a click+drag selection for multiple small areas in PWYL would be cool. Also a way to use PWYL on old saved pages.

  4. Jonathan says:

    I’ve added your idea of repositioning elements to the site’s todo list. For saved pages, I assume you’re talking about pages which are saved to your computer. Try using the bookmarket. Load your saved page in your browser, and click to activate the bookmark. You will be able to edit the page, no problem. You can get the bookmarklet at http://www.printwhatyoulike.com/bookmarklet