Printer-Friendly Calendars in Drupal

I'm maintaining a web site for a Boy Scout Troop, and I set up the Event module and associated bits and pieces a month or so ago in order to publish our calendar online.  Everything worked just fine until one of our parents pointed out that the calendars looked like drunken seagull tracks when they were printed.

Grrrrr.  So I went home and checked it out, and sure enough, the calendars wouldn't print.  So I googled for a solution and discovered that there's a great module for Drupal called, appropriately enough, "Printer Friendly".  I grabbed this, installed it, and sat back in amazement to see that my calendars now looked merely lousy, instead of the formerly illegible.  I have a feeling that the CSS powering the printer-friendly view could probably be tweaked, but I had a Plan-B up my sleeve.

The Events module also supports iCal.  So I wrote a little article explaining to everyone that we had a printer-friendly link, but we also have this cool little icon (  ) down at the bottom of the calendar that lets them load our events into Outlook, Google, or whatever toots their horns. So now, our users can grab all our events, sync them to the four corners of the globe, view them in their favorite calendaring app, and print them using *that* application!

   

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Quote of the day

Here's a nice post talking about recent layoffs at an unnamed company.  Best quote:

And as a general rule, when your recently laid-off employees are looking up labour laws right afterward, you probably haven't handled things in the best possible way.

Been there, done that, looked up the laws.  Welcome the state of modern employment.

Paint.Net – more tool than I thought

paintScreenshotYou ever find out about something that's been right under your nose, and you just missed it?  I've known about Paint.Net forever.  It's a great little graphics program written in Microsoft's .Net platform.  Sort of a replacement for Paint, right?  I get it.

I didn't get it.

Think a little closer to Photoshop.  It turns out that Paint.Net has some pretty sophisticated capabilities hidden in there, including the biggie - plugin support.  There's an active community site with tutorials, tons of downloadable plugins, and more.  I downloaded some of these plugins and played with them a bit, and there's lots, lots more here than I'd been aware of.  If you don't already have a high-end graphics package, this is worth checking out.

Get free Microsoft e-Books

microsoft_booksHere's a great offer from Microsoft.  Although there certainly are moments when I wish MS would behave a little more openly, they've always, always taken great care of their developers.  Their learning programs show signs of renewed momentum with the release of Visual Studio 2008, and here's another example of that.  Just go to http://csna01.libredigital.com/?urvs5cn3s8 (sorry -- it looks like this ship has sailed) and view a chapter from any of these three books, then you'll be able to go back and download the entire book for free.  I'm looking forward to reading the LINQ book, and I'll definitely browse the Silverlight book, too.  I don't know if this is a time-limited offer, but you'd better get on it while you can!