I keep geeking out about my print styles

I don’t often print out blog posts but this Monday I did as I read a particularly interesting post that I wanted to write about so I printed it out and underlined sentences, wrote into margins and so on. The process reminded me of the work I did on this page some time ago to make my blog posts more printing friendly in case someone likes to read them offline while enjoying a hot cup of chamomile tea in a recliner in their reading nook.

You can give it a try by hitting print on your browser for this post and looking at the preview to see how the reading experience changes.

Last year, I wrote about these in my IndieWeb Carnival post on accessibility in personal web. Offering different ways for people to read my content has always been important for me and even though printing blog posts is probably a very small niche, I want to provide the option to those who might enjoy my writing but can’t stare at screens for long periods of time.

Strip out website layout

Printed out, the only thing that really matters is the blog’s content itself. The first thing I did was hide all the navigation, sidebars, footer and extra graphical elements.

Those are lovely and useful when browsing the web but don’t bring anything useful to a reader who’s reading the post in print. It only takes space and ink and I don’t want to waste either.

Remove hero image

I like my hero images as they maintain a consistent style and hopefully over time when people see my post previews online, they recognise mine purely from the hero image style. For a reader sitting at the recliner, there’s no need for such element.

Make URLs visible

You can’t click a link on a paper. I still think it’s often beneficial to know those URLs when a post has been printed. For example, if someone was to collect my posts into a book and filling their shelves with chronicles of my nonsense writing, they could go read any of them after years — even after my site has disappeared from the web — and be able to follow the links (given those have not also disappeared by then).