I felt weird all day today so I spent an hour stumbling around the web, which yielded some quite cool results. One of them is Print What You Like, a truly awesome service designed to help you print only what you need, and to save the environment, nice combination!

If you want to print a webpage you are either stuck to selecting a piece of text, or printing the whole page as is. If you are lucky there’s a printable version, but this removes everything except the text, so again, not too flexible. Print What You Like let’s you enter a website which it renders for you, enabling you to remove any elements you don’t need.

The flexibility here is really great, you can literally add or remove any element whatsoever. You can select paragraphs and resize them horizontally and vertically, all content will get pushed along as it should. You can even change the text size and the text font.

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Tags: print, printing
Categories: Online Services

As you all know, we started a web development section here on gHacks. After asking for your opinion and talking about it with Martin, we decided to keep writing 1-2 posts a week here, but move most of the material into a new site called Scriptastique.

Right now we only have the blog, but tutorial sections and screencasts are on their way! To keep gHacks readers in the know, I will be doing a weekly short roundup of posts, if you like some of them, head on over to the site, take a look and participate in all the fun! So let’s jump to it, here’s what we covered on week 1.

• Checking MySQL queries for errors
• Creating your first function in PHP
• How the internet works – domains and hosting
• Create cool icons in a flash for your website
• Creating rounded corners using only CSS

We have a few more up there, and you can follow us on Twitter and our RSS feed or join us on Facebook. If you have any questions or comments feel free to let me know!

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Tags: coding, html, php, scriptastique, web design, web development
Categories: Web Development

While looking for something completely different I found a handy little tool called Bookmarked Reporter which can parse your site (or use an XML sitemap) and create a report of the delicious bookmark count for all the sub pages. This is great for blogs with many posts, it makes everything easier to track.

Once you have it all set up you can either enter your site URL or enter the location of your sitemap XML. If you use Wordpress the Google Sitemap Generator plugin will create and maintain this file for you, so you can just add the location of that.

You can then generate a report which will take a while, depending on how many links there are. I found this tool handy, but there are many drawbacks. The main one is that it checks del.icio.us, Hatena and Livedoor. Since the developer is Japanese I am guessing it is aimed at the Japanese needs, but delicios is something most of us use, so it’s still handy to have.

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Tags: adobe air, blogging, bookmarks, del.icio.us
Categories: Tools

Since I always go through a lot of ‘phases’ in the way I use software, I am really interested to know how you guys use your browsers. Basically in the beginning I knew nothing of addons and such, so I just used it as is (this ws when tabbed browsing came in).

Once addons were popular I tried a few and I loved them, so I packed my Firefox chock full of them, which gave me load of functionality, but resulted in slower loading times, more frequent crashes and general slowness and clutery.

Since then I have decided that the minimalistic approach is best. I can visit Twittwer’s home page if I want to add a tweet, I can visit Gmail to see if I have unread messages, right now I only have the most essential stuff on. I feel more productive this way actually since I can focus much more on the page I am viewing (working on), as opposed to the eye candy/masses of functionality at my fingertips. Are you the person who enjoys a minimalistic Firefox, or someone who needs to have all the latest addons right now? Let us know!

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Tags: addons, firefox, firefox add-ons, mozilla-firefox
Categories: firefox

If you’ve seen some Wordpress blogs or online stores you’ve probably seen url-s in the form of http://somepage.com/product.php?id=4. These sites pass variables to scripts using the url. The script will scan the url for these and you can use them in a database query for example. This is the technology that allows Wordpress templates to function, since you only need one page for all your posts.

Instead of creating a separate HTML page for each post we make, we enter our posts into a database. Each post is then assigned an id. We simply create one page, say posts.php and the code for that page contains a query, plus all the necessary HTML for displaying a post. This query will pull one specific post from the database and put the correct pieces where they should go in the template.  We can tell the script which one to pick by passing it a variable in the url. If the value of this variable is 135 for example, the post that will be pulled will be the one with this id.

You can see right away how valuable this is, you can build truly dynamic pages with this method. Your data is better organized in a database, and you can change the way you display it by simply modifying the HTML code, no need to recreate any content whatsoever. So how is this done on a code level? Let’s take a look!

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Tags: dynamic content, php, url, variables
Categories: Web Development

While taking a look at my calendar today I noticed that Google has rolled out their offline feture for Google Calendar, and after some searching I found that this is indeed the case for everyone. Since we have become so reliant on the web for everything this should come in handy for times when your router suddenly gives up, or when you’re on the train, trying to take a look at your events.

To enable this feature you will need Google Gears, which will download some stuff for you, then off you go, you can view your calendar offline. Sadly you can only view your calendar at the moment, you won’t be able to edit or add events. I imagine they will be adding this soon, I would think this only requires some simple syncing.

Until then, you have full viewing access to your calendar, and you can use Google Gears with many sites, like Remember The Milk, Google Reader, Zoho Writer, and more. Do you know any other cool sites that work with Google Gears? Let us know, perhaps in the future we can download the whole internet and use it at home!

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Tags: calendar, google gears, offline
Categories: Google, Tools

Google is introducing a lot of developments for Adsense, with font selection implemented not long ago, now comes a new, much anticipated feature, Adsense for parked domains.

Many people own lots of domains which they keep around to sell at a higher price, or they simply haven’t gotten around to developing it, and as such, the “weight” of these webpages are lost, even if someone gets to the page they’ll just see an empty canvas, or some sort of “pricing inquiry notice”.

In this case Google Adsense for domains is a great resource for grabbing that extra buck, since it’s set and forget you won’t really need to do anything, and in the end if you only get a few dollars daily from it, it’s still better than nothing, and lets you use your domains to their full extent.

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Tags: Adsense, domains, Google, parked domains
Categories: Adsense, Online Services