Wednesday, as I was getting ready to leave work, I was printing off some stuff I wanted to read while on the plane to Boston. Tim O’Reilly had recently written an interesting post about the lessons he’s learned so far from his pursuit for a blogging code of conduct. It was too much to really take it all in by reading it on the screen. I printed it off.
Well yesterday I got on the plane. I pulled out the print out of the Tim O’Reilly post. Much to my frustration, I found that the only the first page of the post had printed and that the other 10 pages were all comments.
After further investigation, I see that Tim uses Six Apart‘s product Moveable Type to power his blog. I had written before about how Typepad blogs do not print well. I guess this goes for Six Apart’s whole product line.
I can’t be the only one who prints off blog posts from time to time. Sometimes its easier for me to process what I’m reading if I can scribble on it.
How do you guys feel about this? Anybody else print out blog posts from time to time?
What can we do to fix this? Can someone pass a message to Mena Trott and the folks at Six Apart? It seriously wouldn’t take that long to institute a print style sheet. Maybe if we all start talking about it, they’ll pay attention.
Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp's blog 
We’re definitely working on improving the default print stylesheets for our platforms, but in the case of something like O’Reilly’s Radar blog, they’ve got a completely custom design. That means they’d have to create their own print stylesheet, and unfortunately, that gets overlooked on a lot of sites just due to time or resource constraints.
But you absolutely shouldn’t extrapolate from some individual blogs that we’re not trying to improve this across the board for all our bloggers — these things just take time sometimes, especially since MT’s templating system is extremely flexible.
Thanks for the feedback!
@Anil, I appreciate you taking the time to comment. I wasn’t implying that you’re not trying to make things better. I was just identifying a common bug found across SixApart products that just happens to frustrate me a lot.