I'm excited to share this series with you, called "101 Blogging Tips". In the series there will be 101 blogging tips that you can begin applying to your blog today! Don't wait, get started now!
Tip #88: Make your posts printer friendly
You spend time creating quality content that you want to be shareable, likeable…but is it printable?
When you print a post or just go to a blog in Typepad or WordPress and choose Print or Print Review; TypePad and WordPress isolate the post area only and remove the sidebars from being printed. Very cool!!!!
However, Blogger does not and privately hosted WordPress blogs may not either. So I found this tutorial and tweaked it.
Quick Blogger Tutorial – Print Friendly Post
In Blogger, from the Dashboard, click Template.
- Then, back up your template just in case….
- In the upper-right corner click the Backup/Restore button.
- Click Download Full Template and then save the XML file to your computer, such as in My Documents.
- Click Close, then Close again and you're back at the main Template screen.
- Then click Edit HTML.
- Click Edit Template. Try Format Template as well and you may need to "expand" code as certain line numbers are "hidden"…on the left.
- Scroll down the code or use the find to get to the end of the </head> tag.
- You will insert the code highlighted below. (This is an old snapshot but you'll get the picture.)
- Next, you need to insert the <span class='noprint'> and </span> tags around the sections of your blog that you do not wish to print.
- In this sample below, notice the highlighted areas; hiding the header-wrapper (banner) and the sidebar-wrapper (one of the sidebars). (This is an old screen shot from my original post here, but the code is highlighted appropriately.)
- You would then continue to use the set of <span> tags to hide the other sidebar-wrapper if using a 3-column layout, and the footer area if desired.
- Then click Save Template.
- You're done!
That wasn't so bad right?
One last final thought is that some people like using a button like you see at the top of my post; where it actually links to a PDF of the current post or tutorial that you've personally created and uploaded to your File Manager or Google Drive (formerly known as Google Docs). At Stamping and Blogging we have step by step video and a PDF tutorial on how to use Google Drive to upload a file and link to it from a Blogger post.
Some just like using a little printer image to make it clear to their readers that the post or blog is printer-friendly 😀