Make Your Web Pages and Posts Print Friendly

I've been posting text-only versions of my recipes - from my recipe blog - by using Google Docs.  I think I'm going to change that, though because I was looking at another recipe blog and found this - PrintFriendly.

It makes any web page printer friendly.  It cleans and formats web pages, removing ads, navigation, and all that extra junk you really don't want to waste your ink or paper on.  Users can choose to print images with the text, something at least one of my readers would like to have with her printed recipes, or choose not to print them.  They can also choose to remove any text or elements they don't want and only print what they do.  They can print a hard copy or save as a pdf.

Here's how it works:




PrintFriendly is free and easy to use for anyone.  Browsing a web page you want to print?  Simply copy the url and paste it at PrintFriendly.com or add the bookmarklet to your browser for easy access from anywhere.  Bloggers and web designers can add a button to posts or pages, making it easy for visitors to print their content, which is what I'm going to try for my recipes. 

Whether you're looking to print web pages you visit or want to help people print your pages more easily, check out PrintFriendly and see what you think.

Printing My Pages

I've been working on a new blog to share and organize my recipes - bcmom's kitchen. As I started posting recipes there, I realized that people might want to be able to print the recipes. I might even want to print some of these out. Sometimes I just open the recipe on my computer and then go back and forth between the kitchen and the computer - not very efficient. Or I'll scribble the ingredients on an old envelope or something. It works, but still not ideal.

Printing a recipe from a blog isn't very efficient either. For instance, I just did a print preview for my Cinnamon Roll recipe, and I ended up with 4 pages. Only one of them had the actual recipe, so I suppose someone who wanted to print the recipe could print just that page, but why should it be so complicated? I need a separate, simpler, printable page.

I decided to use Google Docs to create my printable recipe pages. It was really easy, too. I simply copied and pasted the recipe, with no extra text or pictures, into a new document in Google Docs, and then I published the page.



Once I published the page, I copied the link Google gave me and used it on my blog to add a link that says Print this recipe.



When someone clicks the link, they get a new page that contains only the recipe. It makes a clean, simple page that is perfect for printing.

I'm planning to create and publish one of these Google Docs for all the recipes I post on my blog. Hopefully that means more people will be trying my recipes, or at least printing them out with the intent to try them.

Print What You Like

Just read about this on Cariboo Ponderer - Vic Grace always finds the neatest things.

It's called Print What You Like, and it lets you do exactly that. Well, it's supposed to, only it's new and it's neat, and everyone is trying it, so right now it is ' temporarily over its serving quota'. That means I'll have to go back and try it later. It looks like it is going to be a really handy tool. All you have to do it enter the url of the page you wish to print, edit out anything you don't want to print - like ads, images, extra stuff you're not interested in, whatever. No more copying and pasting into Word or Open Office just so you can print the parts you want. You can even combine multiple pages and print them as one, save your changes so you can print again, and even use other people's changes.

I'm looking forward to trying this out.