Webware

We in the industry often use a little trick to eke out extra page views or to let you see more stories on a single page. Called the page break, it truncates longer articles and requires that you click another link to load up the full version of the story. We use it here quite often because our format is to put a bunch of stories (which can be quite long) on one topic-driven page--Webware, Green Tech, Crave, and so on. This can make the site take longer to load and give your scroll wheel finger quite a workout.

There's another side to this though. Publishers will intentionally split up content to a very small space and make you click on a Next button to see the next image or small bit of description. For those who are annoyed by this tactic, there's a new service from the makers of PrintWhatYouLike (coverage), called PageZipper. This Firefox extension and bookmarklet will automatically load the next page in a series of links, right below the existing page. It's almost like you have a second tab open, right below the screen you're viewing.

It's not a perfect system, and relies heavily on publishers formatting their content a certain way. For instance, if you're looking at a Flash- or Javascript-powered slideshow of photos, it won't work. However, to get standard links to open up in a new page it works great.

What I really like about this tool is that it's not cutting out the publisher and whatever ad system they have set up. It's still loading every page, in full below the content that's already loaded. It's simply taking a step out for the user to have to click over and over again.

Here's a quick demo of how it works:

Flickr on Friday announced that it has formed a partnership with Tiny Prints that will see the online stationery site's services become a part of Flickr's "Do More" offering, which currently enables users to add images from their photostream to credit cards, order prints, and create books.

According to Flickr's John Nguyen, Flickr users will be able to create customized stationery with the images contained in their photostream through the Tiny Prints service. He said that Flickr chose to work with Tiny Prints after it got the company's attention with its "lovely, high-quality, beautifully designed baby announcements, wedding invitations and other photo projects, including holiday cards."

Tiny Prints will join Capital One, MOO, and others as part of Flickr's "Do More" group, but unlike those that focus on adding your images to your credit cards or ordering prints, Nguyen was quick to point out that Tiny Prints will only provide stationery services to its customers.

Tiny Prints can be accessed from Flickr's page now. To commemorate the partnership, Tiny Prints is currently offering a $20 discount on all holiday orders over $99.

There's nothing worse than trying to print a two-page article from the Web and have it print out in a half-inch column across 37 sheets of paper. It happens all the time, and if the site you're on doesn't have a special printer friendly option, your only other method was to use special software, or attempt to save the page as a PDF then print it out later.

A service called PrintWhatYouLike takes all the work out of this, and does you one better by letting you select only the parts of the page you want to print, leaving things like large Flash ads, site menus, and other clutter off of your precious bathroom reading.

To do this you just plug in the page's URL. You then have the options of simply clicking the parts of the page you want, or getting rid of things like the site's background and images. There are also some handy tools to change the text size, along with a font changer in case you're printing something off a page that insists on using undersized, illegible fonts.

The service is completely free and worth bookmarking. Power users will want to make use of the bookmarklet, which lets you print any page you're looking at without having to jump back and forth. Just one click and it brings up the special PrintWhatYouLIke interface.

Related: Extra page killer Green Print

[via Lifehacker]

When you run a URL through PrintWhatYouLike it's simply a matter of picking what you actually want to print from the page. (click to enlarge)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

(Credit: Moo Print)

Web-savvy printing company Moo.com has finally buckled from the requests of customers and is launching full-size business cards. The new offering will be available in the next few days.

Card design will still use the same Web-based editor that's been available for Moo's other products, although users will be getting more than twice the size they're used to with Moo's flagship mini cards. There's also a selection of design templates for the front side of the card that will contain all the contact information, which can now be slurped up right from LinkedIn.

For the back side of the card, users can grab up to 50 different photos from popular hosts like Flickr, Facebook, Bebo, and others and get them printed out for $21.99. However, users who sign up to be part of Moo's mailing list can get 20 percent off, bringing the price down to $17.60.

For the environmentally conscious, the new cards also come in two different stocks: the original stock used in the mini cards and a new "green" stock made from 100 percent recycled paper.

A promo video for the new cards is below.

It's a virtual arms race among Web-based photo editors. Each one is trying to partner with as many third-party services as possible in an attempt to gain mass appeal. This morning Picnik, which has already begun to get some traction as the primary editing tool for Flickr has teamed up with Photobox, another large photo host in the United Kingdom.

Photobox is about a fifth of the size of Flickr in active users, and the two have very different services. Photobox provides 1,000MB of storage and gives users more space each time they order prints while Flickr operates on a paid premium membership that requires a yearly subscription of $25.

Also starting today Picnik users will be able to print their shots using QOOP which lets you print your photos on items such as coffee mugs, posters, and T-shirts. Users of Flickr and Picnik won't find this very useful since Flickr's offered QOOP integration since mid-2005. However, folks who are using Picnik as a standalone editor and replacement for desktop software will find that it's an important partnership. In my chat with Picnik CEO Jonathan Sposato back in February, he had noted that a good deal of Picnik users fit that demographic, and that they simply take the edited shots back to their hard drives instead of to other services.

Picnik users now have new options to print their photos using QOOP. They can also grab and edit photos from Photobox. (click to enlarge)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

If you're an office worker in the unfortunate position of having a lackluster printer that's incapable of printing booklets, or have a general hatred of Acrobat's built-in booklet making resources check out BookletCreator.

It's a free service that takes any PDF you can throw at it and reorders the pages and layout to be printable as a multipage booklet. For the sake of your clients, it's even nice enough to send you back a copy that can be printed locally on other nonbooklet printing devices, free of any watermarks or other changes to the original PDF.

It's worth noting the service chokes on password-protected PDFs, so if your file is protected (and you have the password) you should change the PDF security settings to "open" before attempting to run it through the system. Also, if you're looking to only print out the first several pages of a document, it'll let you tweak how many pages you want to print in increments of four.

Related:
Scribd joins platform game, sets sights at killing Adobe Acrobat
PDFescape comes close to replacing Adobe's Acrobat
PDFMeNot lets users click PDF links without fear (or Acrobat)
PDF Hammer lets you tweak PDFs sans software

[via MakeUseOf and LifeHacker]

Last week I described how to use a simple Javascript to determine the age of a Web page. The only problem: if the page has any dynamic elements that update automatically when the page loads (and these days most Web pages do), the script shows the current time and date.

For pages without auto-update content, type javascript:alert(document.lastModified) into the address bar and press Enter to see a window pop-up with the date and time of the page's last update. I'm still looking for a way to find out how recently specific content on a Web page was updated.

As I was looking for such a method, I stumbled upon a great Firefox add-in from Chris Pedericks called the Web Developer Toolbar (download). As the name implies, the free toolbar is intended to help Web designers test their pages, but it can also be used to show only the text of Web pages, which often makes them easier to read--and to print out.

After you download the toolbar, click Options and check Persist Features. Next, click CSS*Disable Styles*All Styles. Now click Images*Disable Image*All Images. Lastly, click Disable*Disable JavaScript*All JavaScript. You'll see only the page's text, and perhaps a couple of broken-image place markers. Be warned, however, that the results are rarely pretty.

In addition to making the pages easier to print, the text-only versions are also much easier to scan for specific information. (Note that you can retain much of the page's original formatting--minus images--by keeping CSS enabled.)

Tomorrow: Put Microsoft Word's styles to good use.

The new print option appears as an option in the upper right of the Organizr tool, so users can now print batches of photos more easily.

(Credit: Yahoo)

As expected, Flickr has retooled its photo printing abilities to make it easier to print batches of photos.

The new print ability is now available in the Organizr tool, which already was available to help users group photos into sets, change viewing permissions, add tags, and otherwise manage their photos. Flickr's Eric Costello announced the Flickr printing move on Yahoo's blog Wednesday.

I loathed Flickr printing in the past, and the new option worked much more smoothly for me. I suspect I'm not alone here in my dislike--Flickr this year got a major influx of new members when Yahoo started closing down its Yahoo Photos service in favor of its faster-growing Flickr site, and the older site was more geared toward old-school photo site tasks such as printing. Indeed, Yahoo steered printing-oriented Yahoo Photos members away from Flickr when presenting migration options.

Various options are available for printing groups of photos.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Previously, a user had to choose individual photos manually to print from each photo's Web page, although one print partner, Qoop, offered a more streamlined approach. Now, the Organizr's new "order prints" option lets a user select a group of photos to print, quickly choose from a variety of photo sizes, and add them to the shopping cart.

Also, opening the contents of a set presents the same option if you've already sorted photos into a batch.

The interface also includes tabs for sending the prints to Flickr's print partners, Qoop and Moo, which offer more elaborate options such as books, mugs, greeting cards, and miniature business cards.

Update: Regular Flickr printing also includes options for ImageKind, Blurb, and Zazzle.

SAN FRANCISCO--Flickr was originally designed for sharing photos, but Yahoo is trying to make life easier for those who want to print pictures and not just see them on a screen.

The Yahoo site is working on an upgrade to Flickr's Organize interface, which lets people select batches of photos, to make it easier to print multiple photos, said Kakul Srivastava, Flirk's director of product management. Today, each photo must be selected individually off its own Web page, which rapidly gets tiresome.

"It should be happening in the next week or so," she said in an interview here at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday. Flickr also announced plans to upgrade the site's ability to put geotagged photos to better use at the show.

The company also is trying to make printing "more interesting," expanding with new possibilities that arrived "since the world of Kodak 4x6 prints," she said. Those new options include photo cubes and photo books enabled through a partnership with Hewlett-Packard that the printer and computer maker announced at the Web 2.0 conference.

Flickr printing today feels to me like a grafted-on afterthought. And with hordes of users moving over from the shutdown of Yahoo Photos, which was more oriented toward printing than sharing, it's wise to pay attention to the feature.

Personally, I'd like to see some other printing-related features, too. Maybe you tagging gurus know a way to do this, but I tag photos when editing them on the computer, and I'd like to include a tag for the shots I'm likely to print so I can rapidly sift them out of the archive at an online site such as Flickr.

I'd also like the ability to show high-resolution versions of photos only to family and friends so they can print their favorites and I don't have to worry that somebody is going to snatch them for their own stock photo purposes. Right now I sometimes upload two versions of a photo, one private and high-resolution and one public and smaller.