Kill the clutter: use the Print view

21 June 2007 · 2 comments

I was reading commentary onTuesday night’s Webstock Mini, which went really well, by the way. Peter Griffin’s articles are a good read: Latest incarnation of net – All fizz, no substance? Blog: The kiwi Firefox connection Virtual beers with Darth Vader, but there’s more to Second Life but they each span a couple of pages, [...]

 

I was reading commentary onTuesday night’s Webstock Mini, which went really well, by the way. Peter Griffin’s articles are a good read:

but they each span a couple of pages, surrounded by blinking, flashing ‘stuff’ and ‘junk’ and ‘clutter’, as with so many pages on the web these days.

Me, I’m a minimalist. I like stuff plain and straight to the point, uncluttered. So I applied a technique I spotted the other day on Lorelle on WordPress (and there’s a blog worth reading, if you’re at all interested in WordPress).

WordPress and other blogs, as well as many websites, can use a feature known as multiple page posts, slicing up a long post into more than one “page”. While this may seem like a smart idea, it sucks.

… In time, you learn to use the Print function, if the page hosts it, which puts the entire article on one page, often without ads. Makes it much easier to read, doesn’t it? On news sites and other sites which divide their pages in articles, I go right for the print link.

[Via Lorelle on WordPress: The Rant Against Multiple Page Posts.]

So, back to the articles on the NZ Herald site: first I clicked the link to View as a single page (below the headline), then I scrolled down to the end of the article and clicked the Print this story link. When the Print Dialog box came up I clicked on the Preview button.

That opened Preview.app, with the plain text article, plus single image that actually belonged to the article, but absent all the flashing clutter. It was easy to enlarge the text as much as I needed (Apple + a few times). When I was done I closed the Preview and went right back to surfing.

Clip to Evernote

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Stephen B 21 June 2007 at 08:57 29

Kia ora Miraz

I also much prefer of only having to view the text I want to read, not all the ads, navigation and other clutter on webpages. I’m a convert to the little Tofu application which allows you to and pasting text from webpages into a screen and split it columns for easy reading. The font size, number of columns are configurable. Using Tofu makes it much easier to read text on screen and means I save trees not having to print stuff. See: http://amarsagoo.info/tofu/index.shtml

Cheers, Stephen

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