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:
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)
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