Although the title of today’s blog pretty much describes my meeting notes (what the heck do those scribbles mean?), I’m referring to a couple of utilities I found this week. Both have been very helpful already, so you might find them useful too.

Print What You Like

First is Print What You Like, a web site that lets you select sections on a web page, before you print. This should reduce the amount of paper and ink that you waste, when extra pages are printed. I’ve spent time copying and pasting web site text into Word, to avoid those extra pages, and this is much easier.

• To start, copy the URL for the page you want to print.
• Go to Print What You Like, paste in the URL, and click Start.
• Your target page appears, and you can point to a section, word, or paragraph, to frame it.
• Click on a framed area to select it, and select as many sections as you’d like.

• Use buttons at the left side of the editor to remove images, remove the background, change the font size and isolate or remove the selections

• Experiment with the settings for a minute or two, and once the page contains only the elements that you want to print, hit the Print button.

LongURL

The other utility is LongURL, a FireFox add-on that lets you point to a condensed URL and see the full text for the designation URL. Twitter is full of these short links, and some are useful, but other, not so much. This might help you avoid sites in which you have no interest, or that might not be suitable for work.

You have to register to download the add-on, and that took a few minutes, but the installation went smoothly, and the add-on works as promised. Occasionally it can’t decipher the URL, but most work fine.