Everyone Has One

I hate printing web pages because of all the miscellaneous junk on them. I usually do a lot of cut and paste to pick out just what I want. Well, no more thanks to Print What You Like. This very innovative and useful website allows you to easily manipulate web pages to get just the content you want to print. It also has some basic text manipulation so that you can get the text portion (which is generally what you want to print) to be more readable.

Although it is directed at printing, the functionality of this site is useful for other purposes. For example, evernote makes it easy to clip webpages or portions of them but grabbing an edited page via PrintWhatYouLike will make it much more readable.

The functions on the page are easy to use and limited to what you need. Hopefully they will keep it feature clean. The handy bookmarklet also makes it easy to pull any page into the service. So besides providing useful functionality, it is well executed.

The Periodic Table of Videos is a great website with videos for each of the elements in the periodic table.

Besides being educational it is very entertaining.

Woopra is an application for tracking website access. It involves both a webserver and local client applications. The client interface is really spectacular.

First off, it is in beta release. I had to wait several weeks to get my website approved. I have since applied for two additional websites and am awaiting approval on them. So I don’t know how long you will have to wait to use this.

First you sign up on their website and when you are approved you get a unique identifier so that woopra can identify your site’s pages. Then you add some code to your web pages (4 lines of javascript) that includes the identifier and will make a call to woopra every time the page is visited so that it can gather statistics. There are also plugins for WordPress blogs and vBulletin (with probably a lot more to come).

Then you download a client application for your OS (Windows, MacOS, Linux) and then the fun begins. I should mention that the installation on Windows was very easy but getting the right version of Java on the Mac was a bit of a pain in the rear (the application uses the very latest version of Java).

The client shows a myriad of statistics in a very graphical way (often with choices of the type of graph). It even includes a live view of who is on your site at the time you are observing. Here is just one screen from the client:



You can also set notifications for specific actions so that you can be alerted when they take place. It is very impressive.

I read an interesting article in Wired magazine about a service call Twine. However, when I went to the site I discovered that I couldn’t try it out because it is in closed beta. I have no interest in giving them my name and other information and then wait some unknown length of time to get into a beta test. One would think that with the long lead times of magazines that by the time the service gets into print the website would be available. Well, I’m unlikely to go back unless I see another article in the future and I’ve forgotten about this failed attempt to get access.

That is not good marketing in my opinion. I think that if a site is ready to be written about in the press, it should be ready for users.

I have been using Google Reader as my RSS reader for a few months now. It has the main requirements that I have for reading blogs:

• is a web service not a separate application
• lets me easily place a blog article into a new tab to read
• lets me quickly scan articles from a blog so I can select the ones I want to read

Google reader uses Ajax and keyboard shortcuts to quickly move from one article to the next and I find it quite convenient to run down the list of articles from a blog.

Adding and manipulating blogs is also done via Ajax and is pretty straightforward.

I had been using Bloglines but like Google Reader slightly more.