This Site in Twenty Years' Time
Thank you for all your thoughts and messages last week. For the first time on this site the number of comments went in to triple figures. In fact there were so many I had to make a server-wide config change to make them all appear! As long as it doesn't go above 200 we'll be ok.
Karen is going to get round to reading all the comments when things settle down and the queue of visitors dies down, but appreciates everybody thinking about her. In fact she was so impressed she asked:
Can we save it for when he's older, so he can read them all?
My immediate answer was yes, but there were the obvious doubts and questions it raised. I'd love to be able to show him all the welcomes he received from around the world, but doubt I'll be able to for that long. It all depends at which age he can appreciate it. I'd imagine by 6 he will be able to understand the concept and that this site and Domino might still be going strong. What about when he's an adult in twenty years time though? Would I have to dig out the DVD with strore.nsf on it and find a Windows emulator capable of running a Domino server and an ancient browser that still understands an antequated HTML v4? Who knows...
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Well the DVD is all well and good, but how about good ole paper? :) Add it to a babybook or something else, somewhere where you may keep all of his kid drawings and such as he grows up. Maybe save it until he becomes a dad, and your an old fart.
I must admit, I'm with Nick. Print it out. If you want to give the kid some more visible nostalgia about the "good old days", print it to PDF as well and save a DVD of that, as it is more likely to be viewable in twenty years than old HTML/CSS/Domino.
Is there a simple way to convert a webpage to a PDF?
Don't forget the Wayback machine at {Link}
Codestore has plenty of entries and I'm sure in 6 months time, we'll see the links that will get you the blog post/comments for Felix's arrival.
Should be a standard feature on your Mac.
Makes sense John, but I can't see how.
Sourceforge has a project called PDFCreator that allows you to print directly to PDF:
{Link}
Sadly, it only appears to support Windows.
PDF995
It comes in two parts and is adware, but it works really well. Installs as a printer driver. I've used it in the past (before I got into Open Office) for sending official letters via email.
Also, only a windows product (from memory) but I'd be happy to be wrong on that count. That said, in Linux you can configure "print to pdf" in CUPS. KDE makes it easy, I expect GNome does as well.
The trouble with PDF print drivers - which I have one of - is they make a mess of the webpage you're printing. Do a print preview of any page and you'll see what you'll get.
If saving the page as a PDF I'd like it to look just like the page itself...
"primoPDF" is another one that installs as printer driver and it's a freeware. I'm not sure whether MAC ver is available.
Maybe you can try a Firefox extension Screen Grab that lets you grab entire page as on image. Then you can print the image. I'm not really sure if it works in FF v2.0, but my girlfriend (she is web designer) used to use it a lot.
Roman's suggestion is far easier to implement than mesing with the intervening layers a page goes through to reach the pdf print driver. Here's the link for Screen grab!. It produces png files, and two other formats, and requries java be configured properly. Worked really well on news.google.com and produced a 962 x 7829 png.
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1146/
Screen grab is not yet compatible with Firefox 2.0
I'm using curePdf works out very well.
Whoops CutePdf is the name..
www.cutepdf.com
Jake,
With Firefox I normally select File/Print then select FireFox instead of Copies & Pages. The available options change to let you select background colors and background images. I then select the PDF button in the bottom left corner and Save as PDF. If you want an exact screen grab then this will not work since you are controlling the print version with a stylesheet and your widths etc... may not be printer friendly.
Here is how I did it on my Windows XP system:
1. Open the web page in Firefox 2.0
2. Save Page as... Web Page HTML only
3. Edit the saved web page to change print stylesheet to screen since we want to print what we see:
From: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="/rsrc/css/print.css" />
To: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="cstore.css" />
4. Open the save in Firefox.
5. Goto File/Page Setup... and make sure "Print Background (image/color)" is checked. You can also change Margins & Header/Footer options.
6. Install any PDF print dirvers. I used PrimoPDF.
7. Print the page to PrimoPDF.
Here are links to my creations:
{Link}
{Link}
Inspired Ketan. Thank you. I'll file that away somewhere and keep my fingers crossed that PDF remains a readable format for years to come...
Ultimately, the longest surviving information we have is on either stone or bone.
The second longest is on papyrus.
Paper will probably last 20 years, though. If you're lucky. ;-)
Personally, I'd suggest that the content is perhaps a little more than the formatting that surrounds it. I'd recommend printing to PDF, but I'd also recommend saving the page as a plain text file and - if you can find a way to convert it correctly - as an ODF file. The ODF spec should last the decades.
But you might want to take a course in stoneworking, just in case. ;-)