Check out the following video to see PageZipper in action:
PageZipper is a free Firefox extension and IE Bookmarklet that can merge articles or listings spanning multiple pages into a single browser page. It is useful in situations where you are interested in grabbing a web-clipping or exporting the entire article or listing to another application in one fell swoop, or simply if you would prefer not to have to keep pressing the “next” button to get through the article.
I’ve known about this browser extension for a while, but I am writing about it now after using it recently and finding it to be an invaluable tool.
I recently needed to download some 450 or so entries into Excel from a browser-based workflow and ticketing system that we use at work . There is no “export” function and I simply intended to copy and paste the rows of text into my spreadsheet. The only problem was that there were 40 listings per each displayed page in the browser, and that number was not customizible. I would have had to manually browse through a dozen or so pages and copy and paste a whole bunch of times in order to complete what I thought should have been a fairly straightforward process. This is when I remembered the PageZipper bookmarklet on my browsers; a single click loaded all listings pages instantly into the same browser page, and a single copy/paste transferred all the data into my spreadsheet all at once.
Here are more notes on this program:
- It works well: in articles or listings that employ “next” links to move to the next page, including most search-style results.
- It does not work well: in articles or pages that do not use “next” links or use a custom navigation scheme such as javascript (it does not work well with this site).
- Headers and footers: from all pages are loaded into your consolidated page. This means that if you want to grab the information on the page and are concerned about esthetics you will have to go in later on and clean up your web clipping manually.
- Be careful how you use: using PageZipper on search results that may span dozens or hundreds of pages means that your browser will be downloading and appending pages forever, and you will have to abort.
- How to install: for Firefox you simply install a plugin. For IE you will need to place a Javascript bookmarklet on your favorites toolbar (or in your favorites folder). Instructions on how to do this are on the PageZipper site.
Wish list (or how this program can be even better)
- The option to specify a specific number of “next” links to load. For example, if I am looking at a set of results that span 100 pages I might want to, say, consolidate and clip the first 5 pages only. It would be great if I could specify this, although I realize that it may be tough to embed too much interactive functionality into a javascript bookmarklet.
The verdict: a brilliant and original idea. This little service will be extremely valuable to anyone who does a lot of research on the internet (and/or a lot of clipping of web content). It will also be very valuable to anyone who might work with browser-based reporting systems where they might want to grab/clip or quickly copy information that spans many pages wholesale into the clipboard.
Compatibility: Requires Internet Explorer or Firefox browser.
Go to the PageZipper page to get the latest version.
Posts on other sites that you may like:
I would strongly recommend the “repagination” add-on instead.
http://blog.andreineculau.com/2008/06/repagination/
The max version is set to 3.*, so it should work on Firefox 3.6.
It does the same thing as PageZipper but lets you control how many pages you want loading up, as well as allowing you to kill the loading if you happen to change your mind after clicking.
Use it to right-click on either the “Next” or “2″ link and choose how many pages to have come up in a single page.
I use AutoPager Lite for most of my regular browsing of multiple pages, but repagination is great for those sites where there are no AutoPager rules available.
I’ve tried using it.
I think your second bullet point says most of what needs to be said:
It does not work well.
Also try Autopager. It’s a Firefox Plugin that can load just the content of the next page and strip out header, footer and menus, and you can teach it to recognize new sites
The Bookmarklet also works in Opera 10.10
Samer,
Faced with a similar problem you had (a larger problem, actually, since I had to pull out much more than 450 items) I found another free tool: Djuggler — it is relatively simple to use and very powerful screen scraping utility that requires no programming… After you have used it once, making new extractions from the same site becomes a piece of cake.
Djuggler (site here: http://www.djuggler.com/) seems to have pulled out their free version (“Djuggler Personal”) from the download section, but you can still get it at download dot com.
The free version has a limitation in the number of actions it will execute, but that limit is pretty high and will suffice for most personal uses…
Regards,
-Ricardo
I usually avoid multi-page articles but wanted to read one today and remembered this post.
Bookmarklet worked like a charm in Opera.
On your wish – it seems to only loads next page when you scroll, not all pages at once. So there is no overhead of too many pages, it only goes as far as you scroll.