Thursday, August 13, 2009

Saving/Printing Google Reader stories through PrintFriendly.com


Recently Google Reader added a new feature, 'Send To', that can be configured on the Reader Settings page. 'Send To' lets you pass the original article's URL to a few predefined online sites and services.

Luckily, in addition to the predefined sites, it is also possible to add and configure custom services that you'd like to process the URL with.
One of my favorite pages is PrintFriendly.com, that can print a page or post after stripping away content that is not part of the main article. It can also save the page as a PDF file.
So right away I tried to create an custom 'Send To' item for Google Reader, that lets me forward the article to PrintFriendly for processing.

All you have to do is go to the 'Send To' tab on the Settings page, click on the 'Create a custom link' button at the bottom and enter the following information:

Name : PrintFriendly
URL : http://www.printfriendly.com/print?url=${url}
Icon URL : http://cdn.printfriendly.com/pf-icon.gif

and click save.
After that, when you read an article in the Reader, the Send To list at the bottom will include the PrintFriendly option, in addition to the others you enabled. Clicking it will bring up the PrintFriendly.com page with the article already loaded and cleaned up. You can do further editing before printing or saving to PDF.