Print What You Like

PrintWhatYouLike News

Holy Cow!!

Wow! The response to PrintWhatYouLike has been overwhelming!  Thanks to everyone who has tried out the site! Unfortunately, the response has literally been overwhelming for the server. Since this morning the site has been coughing up “exceeded quota” error messages. Some changes have been made to reduce the load on the server, I think the error messages have mostly gone away now.

To reduce the server load, I had to remove the save changes feature. With save changes, every time somebody makes a change on a page, an ajax request with the contents of the change is sent down to the server. The next time somebody goes to the same page, the site will offer to apply the previous changes to the page.

I’m working on revamping the save changes feature so there is a save button. You changes will only be saved when you click the button, as opposed to any tme you make a change.

19 Comments September 19th, 2008 by Jonathan

And we're live…

After being annoyed by how bad webpages look when printed for about 10 years now, I’ve finally decided to do something about it! PrintWhatYouLike.com is the result. The idea is that you should be able to manipulate pages to make them print as nice as an article printed in a journal.  No ads, no half the page taken up by empty space, and no info boxes sitting above the text you are trying to read. Just the stuff you wanted to print.

I coded this application to suit my own needs. So everything works perfectly, for me:) But since you are not like me, you are probably wondering why the heck doesn’t this thing support feature xyz. So if you have any ideas about how PrintWhatYouLike could be made better, please write them down in the comments section!  Here are some of the new features I’m working on:

  • The ability to save a set of changes.  So if I was a student majoring in city planning, and I print lots of articles from The Journal of Urban Design, I could go to an article on that site, apply all the changes needed to make the page print worthy, and then save that set of changes. The next time I need to print an article from that site, I can just apply my saved set of changes to the new article. Making any article on that site printer friendly is now just a matter of clicking the button to apply my saved changes. If later I also need to print articles from Urban Design International, I can just create a second template for that site.
  • The ability to resize page elements
  • If page includes both screen and print stylesheets, use the print stylesheet
  • An odometer type dial that tracks how much paper you have saved
  • Fix all the bugs!

If you have any other ideas, please let me know! Or if you have spotted any bugs, or used the site in an interesting way, or know of other ways to save paper, or have a friend in Nigeria who needs to transfer some money, please add it too the comments!

29 Comments September 12th, 2008 by Jonathan