Enter PrintFriendly. It’s a simple-to-use tool (but was definitely not so simple to implement, but we’ll come to that later) which cleans up a page of all needless junk like ads, background colors, fancy graphics, etc. to print the most important part, the content. Of course, it’s definitely not the first tool which does this -  PrintFriendly takes a slightly different approach from others – we tried to make the tool dead simple to understand and use, without bogging down the user with too many options. Also, we made it easily installable, by just inserting a few lines of javascript code in your site if you are a publisher, or you could use our wordpress plugin if you are a blogger. Perhaps the most convenient from the user’s perspective – a browser bookmarklet, which you can just drag into your bookmarks folder and you’re good to go. You can even generate and save a PDF copy of the cleaned up content. Do give it a try. I’d love to hear your feedback.

Regarding what went into it, there’s been plenty of effort. Javascript wasn’t my strongest suites when it comes to programming languages, but it’s certainly different now. Writing cross-browser compatible javascript bookmarklet that has so much of functionality baked in, yet tries to make it very easy for the user, did teach me a lot. In the process, I learned the strengths and weaknesses of several javascript libraries (my favorite is YUI, I have to admit – though jQuery comes pretty close), learned a ton about javascript itself, got to know so many cool projects, and in the process understood why javascript will stay at the forefront of web innovation for a long time to come.

Working with so many browsers with something as finicky as DOM behavior, and the differences between their event models, was a relevation. Needless to say, Firefox has been the easiest to work with, and IE the toughest. Chrome and Safari behave pretty much the same way, due to their being powered by the WebKit engine. While development is a joy in Firefox due to the venerable Firebug and Web Developer plugins, it was the toughest to debug on IE7. Interestingly, IE8 has a very good developer mode. Both Safari and Chrome slightly disappoint – though powered by an open-source engine, yet not having really good developer tools to test and debug. YUI’s well-documented, rock-solid libraries helped immensely in smoothing over some of these differences.

All in all, it has been a very challenging yet fun project to develop, and a huge learning opportunity on so many levels. There were ups and downs, when we were able to deploy it as the default print tool on hubpages.com, which was a great experience for us. We were excited when we got invited to interview with YCombinator, but slightly disappointed when we couldn’t make it through the interview. But work continues apace, and as we always thought and PG wished, we will continue developing the tool, as the “world needs something like this”.

We’re still working furiously on bringing out more ways of distributing the tool – I’ll definitely keep you posted about the developments. Meanwhile, go check it out, and tell us what you think. If you want a quick demo, you can test it out on this blog itself – just click on the ‘PrintFriendly’ button at the bottom of this article. You can mail in your feedback on support AT printfriendly DOT com or simply click on the feedback tab on the left side of the page. Thanks! Stay tuned for updates.

There are several tricks to make sure jQuery doesn’t conflict with other frameworks, but none of them actually worked satisfactorily. We ended up using YUI instead because one of its’ strong points is a non-conflicting namespace. Another stroke of luck – I have been meaning to work with YUI too, but finally got the chance. A pretty tight deadline meant I had to get up to snuff with a lot of JS concepts that I understood only hazily, and it was great fun working with JS again.

JS is a very powerful language, and it’s very true that it’s a language that wears the syntax of Java, but it’s actually a kind of Lisp. It is very much like functional languages in its’ design, where functions are first class objects, of course with closures etc. Plus, YUI makes it even more fun – it has a complete set of controls which help you build very rich UIs. Also, if you’re interested in JS at all, I recommend reading YUI Blog – a veritable gold mine of JS-related info. A very enlightening blog.