PrintWhatYouLike – Yep, You Can Print What You Like

I will admit that I enjoy reviewing startups that provide useful services. It doesn’t matter if it’s perceived as Web 2.0 or not. Tonight I have a very useful service that will actually save you printer ink and paper. The service is named PrintWhatYouLike and it does just that, allows you to print the parts of a Web page that you want.

If you’ve been doing this Web thing as long as I, you certainly remember the hell of printing back in the early days. Then we moved to a 600 pixel width table and printing became a bit easier. Next we moved to 800 pixel width and the launch of "printer friendly" pages. Today’s browsers can shrink things on the fly to fit to a page but it still can be a pain. Typically you want certain sections of a page and not the entire page.

Josh has a good review of the service which can easily save you ink – and ink isn’t cheap! The only concern I have with the site is that there should be parts of the page that are required to print – perhaps the logo, the disclaimers, etc. Maybe a new microformat could be created that Web developers set to "must print" status.

In my testing, the service works very well. The only weird item is that the homepage says "test it out" and if you click that, it loads the printing editor. But in the middle there’s a "enter the url to print" which you can’t change because you are in the editor. It took me a bit to "get" that I needed to use the buttons on the left to select another page.  

There’s no business model on the site currently but I could easily see selling this to large content sites in a white-label format.