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PageZipper Chrome Extension

We just released a Chrome Extension for PageZipper, too! If your favorite browser is Chrome, you can now load PageZipper faster with the extension. Enjoy!

4 Comments August 3rd, 2011 by Cassie

PrintWhatYouZip!

We finally combined our two projects, PrintWhatYouLike and PageZipper! Thanks for the great suggestion from our users! On the PrintWhatYouLike toolbar, there is an ‘Add Next Page’ button that will add the next page for you based on what PageZipper thinks is the next page. The button will only show up on pages that have a ‘Next’ link. When you add the next page, any edits you have made to the first page will be applied the next page so that everything prints out nicely.  Try it out on Time’s list of the top ten state fair foods, and get in the mood for delicious and unusual food at your state fair!

3 Comments July 29th, 2011 by Cassie

Chrome Extension

To make using PrintWhatYouLike even easier, we just released a Chrome Extension! The Chrome Extension behaves like the Bookmarklet and loads the PrintWhatYouLike editor on the web page you’re currently viewing. However, the Chrome Extension loads PrintWhatYouLike much faster! Also, if you have sync enabled for Chrome, you will have PrintWhatYouLike available on all the computers you use by installing it just once!

10 Comments July 21st, 2011 by Cassie

Upgrade to Rails 3

PrintWhatYouLike got some much deserved TLC, and it has been upgraded to Ruby on Rails 3! This should make PrintWhatYouLike perform better, so enjoy! Also, the PrintWhatYouLike WordPress Plugin has been updated and tested with the newest version of WordPress, 3.2.

2 Comments July 7th, 2011 by Cassie

Ads

We all love getting stuff for free, and we want to keep PrintWhatYouLike free. Unfortunately, it does cost money to keep PrintWhatYouLike running. In order to pay the bills, we’ve placed ads on the toolbar. If you need more printing supplies, please consider buying your ink or paper through one of the ads on the toolbar to support PrintWhatYouLike and keep the service free. Thanks!

Also, if you’re interested in advertising on PrintWhatYouLike, send us an email.

5 Comments July 8th, 2010 by Cassie

New Look for the PrintWhatYouLike Toolbar

Since we designed the PrintWhatYouLike toolbar, it is simple and easy for us to use. However, when we asked our parents to try it out, it was a whole different story… At first they tried clicking on the Print button, thinking it would magically format the page for them, but they were disappointed to find out that it only printed the page as is. It went from bad to worse as we watched them struggle to figure out how to use the different options for editing the page. My mom only wanted to print part of a web page, but she had trouble selecting exactly what she wanted to print. She had no clue that the ‘More’ and ‘Less’ options could change the size of the selection.

We decided to redesign the toolbar so that anyone can use it, even your parents or grandparents! We reduced a lot of the confusion by removing the options from the toolbar that only apply to selected elements. Instead, a menu pops up next to the selected element with the options for editing the selection. This simplified the options available on the toolbar.

A few more changes to how things work:

  1. The ‘Apply Change Set’ dropdown menu will only appear when there is a change set available to apply to the page.
  2. We removed the ‘Save Change Set’ button. To a save change set, click on ‘Save As’, and select ‘Change Set’.

We think PrintWhatYouLike is much easier to use now, so try it out! Let us know what you think of the new toolbar, and send us your stories of showing your parents or grandparents how to use PrintWhatYouLike!

20 Comments April 15th, 2010 by Cassie

Make Your Website Printer Friendly

Making your website printer friendly is kind of like flossing – everyone knows you’re supposed to do it, but few people bother because it’s such a pain.  Now you can use PrintWhatYouLike to generate a printer friendly format for your site!  No programming knowledge is required, and it only takes a couple minutes.

Here’s how it works: 1) Use the PWYL editor to format a page on your site for printing. 2) Copy the print button code to your blog. 3) When a reader clicks the button on your site, your changes will be applied to the page the reader is viewing, rendering it for print.

In addition to providing your readers with a nicely formatted page for printing, there are also options to save the page as a PDF, customize the page, and undo all the changes.

Add the button to your own site here: www.printwhatyoulike.com/print_button

2 Comments June 16th, 2009 by Cassie

Introducing PrintWhatYouLike Pro!

We just released a new version of PrintWhatYouLike with some great additional features!

Change Sets

Now you can save the changes you make in PrintWhatYouLike and reapply those changes on other pages.  For example, if you print lots of recipes from a website, you can save the set of changes it takes to make the recipe print nicely.  The next time you need to print a recipe, just apply your changes.  This is a great way to save time and easily make any web page printer friendly.

Clips

Do you compile bits and pieces of information from lots of different web pages?  Usually, you will try to paste the parts of the web page into a Word document, but the formatting gets all messed up.  I have to do this when I make handouts for my Girl Scout troop, and it is a real pain.  With PrintWhatYouLike Pro, you can save snippets of web pages and easily compile them together into one document for printing.  Since you do it all from browser, the formatting is preserved, and your document will look great when it is printed.

Track Savings

Now you can track how much money you are saving! PrintWhatYouLike tracks your savings in pages saved, money saved, trees saved, and CO2 saved

Accounts

Since the new features require saving information, you will need to sign up for an account to use the new features.  You can try out the new features by signing up for a Free Trial Account.  You can save two change sets and six clips with a Free Trial Account.  If you really like the new features, you can upgrade to a Pro account for $5/month and save unlimited change sets and clips!

1 Comment May 21st, 2009 by Cassie

PageZipper – read more, click less

We just released a bunch of new features for PageZipper!  Viewing image galleries is now a breeze, and Firefox users can enjoy the Firefox Extension.

PageZipper takes articles which have been split into multiple pages and merges them back to one.  So when you get to the bottom of an article, instead of clicking “Next” and staring off into space for 5 seconds while the page loads,  just keep on reading.  PageZipper will get the next page and add it to the bottom of the page you’re on.

PageZipper is most useful on image galleries.  IMHO image galleries that put each image on a seperate page are a blight on the human race.  Have you ever been on a gallery that’s so slow you actually click “next” as soon as the page loads, because you will be done viewing the image before the next page loads??  Well PageZipper makes photo galleries work the way nature intended. Just click control down. PageZipper will automatically center the next image in your browser.  Continue clicking control down to view the remaining images.  Press control-up to view the previous image.  PageZipper takes care of figuring out which images are part of the gallery, and which pages needs to load to get those images.  It even resizes any images which are too big to fit in your browser without scrolling.  All you need to do is press control-down.

Cassie made a super cool video showing how all this works here: http://www.printwhatyoulike.com/pagezipper

PageZipper also seems to have been noticed by the web.  It’s been on the pwyl site since December without hardly catching a glance.  But a few days ago twitter user @steverubel mentioned it, and since then its been spreading like wildfire.  Here are some good write-ups:  cnet webware and Technology Bites I love how the internet works like that.

8 Comments March 31st, 2009 by Jonathan

Support for Internationalized URLs

PrintWhatYouLike gets a lot of traffic from outside the US, and we found that many users were unable to use PrintWhatYouLike on sites that have international characters in the URL.  For example, Wikipedia has versions of its free encyclopedia in many different languages, and the URLs for the articles include international characters, such as http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/??????.  In addition, some sites have internationalized domain names, such as http://www.hören.at.  We have added support for internationalized URLs, so go print articles from Wikipedia in any language you want!

Comments Off on Support for Internationalized URLs March 5th, 2009 by Jonathan