Offline and in print
These days, I am reading blogs in a unique way: by printing long articles to pdf and reading them offline1. Simply because I cannot afford to be connected on a dial-up for long and keep the land-line occupied during my reading time.
While I did this, I realized my own current theme lacked a print stylesheet for such a thing. So, I spared some time to crack up a simple sheet for printing exclusively2.
The best I like about this print sheet is that links in the posts are now expanded, within brackets, for offline users, thereby making them more accessible.
Update: Plenty of juice for those who want to try this on their sites, all from the very awesome night school for wannabe designers, ALA.
- Going to Print
- Improving Link Display for Print
- ALA’s New Print Styles
- Printing a Book with CSS: Boom!
- High-Resolution Image Printing
- Print to Preview
- You must be wondering whatever happened to my copy of FeedDemon. Well, it has far too many unread posts, for one. And FeedDemon fails to load the post when the feed has pictures, which in turn can only be viewed online. But instead of the picture being made unavailable, FeedDemon makes the entire feed unreadable/invisible for offline reading. [←]
- Take a look at print preview of this page or any post, or print to pdf if you like. [←]
Got to say, Chetan, it seems pretty inefficient to me to save PDFs for offline reading, specially if there is no intent to keep
I would say, dump FeedDemon (if it doesn’t longer servers your purpose) and get a feed reader that doesn’t have that limitation. For offline reading, a feed reader is the way to go (unless, of course, you only get very little blurbs with the feed, and not the whole thing).
OT, every time I come here, I find you have changed the font size. Do you have some type of randomizer script to cause that effect? Curious.
Nov 3, 06 at 18:18I work for NewsGator in technical support. I noticed your comment about FeedDemon not displaying the feed when in offline mode.
In my experience, if FD is offline and unable to load embedded images, it should still display the text of the post. I’d be happy to troubleshoot this for you if you can send some details to us at support@newsgator.com.
A couple things I need to know:
- Your FeedDemon version (from Help | About)
- What feed(s) do you see the problem with and what the URLs?
- What newspaper style are you using?
- Can you provide a screenshot of the problem?
Please be sure to include a link back to this blog post as well.
Jack Brewster
Nov 4, 06 at 06:25Technical Support
NewsGator Technologies
Jack, thanks for helping out. Here are the details (will also forward this to the support email.
- Version: FeedDemon 2.0
- Problem with any of the feeds with image embedded, some of them with Flickr images.
- Default newspaper style is the default one.
- Will try and replicate that. (I had FD uninstalled, duh, for being unable to use offline.)
Nov 4, 06 at 10:10No :), I wouldn’t do that (isn’t that weird behavior :)). I must have had toggled a different theme between your visits (It was there only for a couple of days).
Nov 4, 06 at 10:14