Wednesday 21 August 2019

An essential tool for family history bloggers

Is your blog print friendly?

If you have a Blogger blog consider installing a Print Friendly button for those who wish to save your posts or indeed for you to save your own posts to PDF.

Not all browsers have a reading mode to remove the annoying distractions found on many blogs, and not all readers will have a PrintFriendly extension installed on their browser. Many bloggers use Adsense to generate some income. The PrintFriendly button allows your reader to save a post without that extraneous content. It also removes the sidebar and any gadgets contained therein.
  1. In the Layout mode from your Blogger dashboard choose the area where you want to insert the Print Friendly button. On this blog, I have chosen to insert it at the bottom of the post in the Footer area.
  2. Add gadget - choose the HTML/Javascript gadget

  3. Head over to https://www.printfriendly.com/button and choose the style of button you want to add.
  4. Select the features you require, decide whether to allow click to delete sections or not, then copy the code generated into the blogger gadget and save.
  5. Save the Layout and choose a post from your blog to view. It will now display your chosen button.
Here's how the heading of a PrintFriendly page appears from one of my recent posts. Notice the choice of text size and image size. Image size can be set to 0 to remove all images.

Once the PrintFriendly page has been generated, hover over individual paragraphs or headings to reveal the bin to delete any sections not needed in the print or PDF version. This only works if you made that selection before copying the code. I have it disabled on this blog.
Do experiment and test what works best for you.

To view an alternate PrintFriendly button head over to my family history blog, Earlier Years or view the PrintFriendly button inserted in the sidebar in Just at Tarlee.

Limitations

  • If the button is installed in the footer area of the page, it displays at the bottom of all the posts you have chosen to have display. To determine how many posts show on your main page go to Settings | Posts and Comments | Show at most and select the desired number.  It will always display when an individual post link is selected.
  • If the button is installed in the Sidebar it is always visible, but will print all the posts you have chosen to display.

For your own use, consider installing the free PrintFriendly extension for Chrome and simply click on it when you visit one of those annoying sites with dozens of advertisements.

This post first appeared on https://carmelgalvin.info

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