2 Pass-it-on wordpress plugins

I can’t stand to read a big, long article on a computer screen. This, combined with my printer that devours SIX (6) Fifteen Dollar ($15) Ink Cartridges every couple months or so, is the reason that I have to eat belly lint and Ramen noodles for dinner every night.

On a related note, it’s a big help to have articles automatically re-format themselves when you go to print them. I also like it when there’s an easy “email to a friend” link on each post. Occasionally, I’ll copy-and-paste a link into an email, but usually, I won’t do it.

With that in mind, here are 2 Wordpress plugins: One automatically creates an e-mail link, and the other formats your posts for the printed page.

WP-Print

WP-Print does more than just format your post for printing–it even footnotes every link you use and displays it, typed out, at the bottom of the page. After you download WP-Print and copy it to your plugins directory and activate it, just place the following line in your single post page where you’d like the link to occur:

<?php if(function_exists('wp_print')) { print_link(); } ?>

The actual look and wording of the link is managed from the Options screen in the Wordpress login area.

One thing to keep in mind about WP-Print: According to Devlounge:

I’ve personally stopped using the “WP-Print” plugin after discovering that the only pages Google indexed were my printer friendly pages. The fact that Google indexed my printer friendly pages is a significant problem because printer friendly pages are orphan pages with no link back to the main site.

So use at your own risk. I can’t verify this at present.

Send to a Friend

There’s a few different ways to do this, but my favorite (and the one on this site) is Send to a Friend. Clicking the e-mail link brings up the popup window you see here–simple and effective. You can even change the “Your Name:” and other prompts (and the colors) in the Options menu.

After installing the plugin, place the following on your post page:

<?php StaF_html(); ?>

Easy. You can also easily add an “Email This” link to your site and RSS feed (and a ton of other stuff) with the always-nice Feedburner, but this does the job from within Wordpress.

If you’d like to see these two plugins in action, scroll back up to the top of the page.