Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

[Update] The prints of blogs

I got a note from Dave the other day, telling me he sometimes wants to print out some of my blog articles, but can't get them to print in a sensible form from either Firefox or Internet Explorer. I'd never tried this before, but I quickly saw what he meant when I saw the screwy formatting that results. Apparently, this is an inherent issue with TypePad blogs (and possibly others).

I suggested a workaround that I'm sharing here, since it may help if you want to print out articles from the blogs you read.

  1. Install and run the free RSS aggregator SharpReader (this is my favorite RSS reader for Windows)

  2. Paste the URL for the blog you want to print from into the SharpReader address bar. SharpReader will autodiscover the RSS feed and you'll see a list of the articles in a list. If you want to subscribe to the feed, you might as well click the Subscribe button right now.

  3. Click on the article you want to print, and you'll see it appear in SharpReader's viewer pane.

  4. Right click on the article text in the viewer pane, and select "Print" from the context menu. From here, it's just a normal print dialog.

This works very well and doesn't require any changes to any of the blogs you're reading - and since SharpReader is free, the price is right.

Below, I've provided a link to a PDF (created using Nitro PDF Pro, of course) showing a sample of what the output looks like:

Update March 10:

If you don't want to install another RSS reader, another option (for my site, at least) is to subscribe to the email alerts on my site (in the left navigation bar). I use a wonderful, free service called RSSFwd that will email a print-worthy copy of each new post to you. You can then print out any articles you'd like to print. It's privacy-friendly, as well - I don't have access to your email address through this method, and you don't receive any emails other than the posts through this method.

And fellow bloggers, the service is a snap to set up and use, so give it a try if you want to provide alternatives to share your ideas.