Month: November 2009

I’ve never been skilled in crafty things.  It was evident early on.  My  school arts and crafts projects were dreadful:  the ashtray from kindergarten (remember when we actively encouraged young children to make ashtrays for mom and dad…good times) was nothing more than a baby blue glazed blob of clay, my soda bottle vase had huge gaps between rows of yarn that we glued to the outside to make a “pretty” design, and let’s not even dwell on the macaroni or tissue paper art.  I don’t know how I came home with straight A’s on my report card because I don’t know how I managed to pass art.

Things didn’t get any better as I got older.  There was that one time in college with the fabric covered photo albums but that was about as successful as I got.  And in hindsight, that was pretty bad too.  Thanks to Martha Stewart, my self esteem got even lower when I couldn’t recreate a single one of her Good Things crafts.  Damn that woman and her glue gun.

So crafts and I don’t spend much time together.  I remember dreading the assignment when I was pledging my sorority to make a college that said something about me.  What I really wanted to do was show up to that meeting with a blank piece of paper.  But like a good student, I busted out the scissors and glue for some old fashioned cut and paste.  To this day, I hate cut and paste.  Not because of that collage, but because even with a craft as simple as that, my skills are woefully lacking.

There’s another reason I hate cut and paste that has nothing to do with crafts.  I hate cut and paste because this blog does not have one of those nifty “print” buttons I see at other websites.  WordPress.com, oh wordpress.com why can’t you include that in your templates?  Sure, I could just “print page” and whatnot but then the page format is all wrong and the sidebars print and it’s just not what I want.  So each post that I print out has to be cut and pasted from wordpress into Word.  And then I have to change font, and resize images, and change page margins.  What a pain.  Between Exit 51 and BAH, I’ve been blogging for over two years.  That’s a lot of cut and paste going on.

And what about you?  Are you less inclined to actually try one of the recipes posted here since there’s no pretty “print page”?  I hope not.

I was convinced there was no solution to this cut and paste problem until I either learned how to code or convinced The Mistah to code for me.  And then I stumbled on a blog post that may change my life.  It explained how to set up a “print page”.  My days of cutting and pasting my own blog posts may be behind me.

Now, you’ll see a {Printable Recipe} hyperlink on my posts that will open up a browser window with a formatted and printable copy of the recipe.  Don’t be alarmed when it takes you to a site with a completely different name, nobody has hijacked BAH.  It’s just that until the print function gets built into my blog the right way, the printable recipes have to live somewhere else.  Since this somewhere else happens to be a completely different website, and BAH only links to it, there may be glitches from time to time depending on how the Interwebs feel.

I don’t know about you, but I’m happy to be able to put down the scissors and glue and get back to cooking.

UPDATE:  Once I started working on incorporating links to printable versions of the recipes in my posts, I started to get a little uneasy.   Sending you to another website, even if it was one that I set up, just didn’t feel right.  It also meant that you could bypass BAH altogether and go straight to Site B to download the recipes.  So, I’ve found an alternate solution.

It may be a bit clunkier since it involves you opening pdf files in your browser.  But as long as you have a pdf reader (they’re free you know) installed on your computer, you should be fine.  Just look for the {Printable Recipe} link, click, open, and print.

Wow, I feel much better now.