Kelly Dawson is a Los Angeles-based writer, editor, and media consultant. She has been a regular contributor to Architectural Digest since 2017 and Dwell Magazine since 2015. Her writing has been featured in a wide variety of design publications, including Martha Stewart Living, Food52, Real Simple, Curbed, and Apartment Therapy. She also produces marketing and editorial content for West Elm, and runs a digital content and consulting agency called At the Crosswalk.
In addition to her writing and consulting, she has also cultivated a robust, thoughtful community on Twitter where she tweets about writing, freelancing, and general life musings. In March, Kelly sent out a helpful tip to her fellow writers reminding them to save their work regularly:
Why is it necessary to save PDFs of your work? Read on for more about how freelancers can safeguard against the unpredictability of online media.
A constantly shifting online landscape
As a freelance writer, Kelly’s work is primarily on the internet, entrusted to media companies that of late have been in flux. When a media company shuts down, the work of its contributing freelance writers is up in the air and can suddenly disappear. Also, because freelance writers often work for multiple publications, it’s difficult to keep track of what’s happening to which publication, and what that means for a writer’s bylines.
Internet scholars have also been observing in recent years how the modern web seems to be decaying from lack of maintenance, with more and more webpages containing link rot. In one study, approximately 2 million externally-facing links found in articles at nytimes.com were analyzed, and the findings were stark:
Overall, more than half of all articles in The New York Times that contain deep links have at least one rotted link.
—Jonathan Zittrain, The Internet is Rotting
These are precarious conditions for a freelance writer, whose resume might be up for debate if their work is not being preserved.
Some peace of mind
For Kelly, she is able to secure her work by using GoFullPage to create PDFs of her work as she is published. If a website disappears, her work is still saved exactly as it appeared on the website. GoFullPage is a one-click, painfree way to take an important concern off her plate, the worry that her hard work might be unprotected and unverifiable.
Freelance writing is precarious enough, you don’t want to worry about if or when your work just suddenly disappears! GoFullPage is yet another tool to have in your pocket to be successful. You need to be able to say, “these are my clips and this is how I’m getting work”, so that you aren’t relying on someone else to make sure your work is preserved.
Kelly Dawson
Using GoFullPage: free and premium
With our free browser extension, you can capture and download unlimited full page screenshots.
For best results you can prep the page before you screenshot it by:
- scrolling the page and loading all the content first before engaging the extension
- changing the width of the webpage window so that the formatting of the page is optimized
Here is how this looks on an example piece written by Kelly:
GoFullPage Premium: clickable URL and Smart Page Splitting
In addition to the free extension, GoFullPage also contains premium editing features that can provide additional information for record-keeping. For example, if a URL is added to the screenshot using GoFullPage’s Premium editor, the URL will be clickable on the saved PDF:
The URL can also be added automatically to every PDF saved. This means that the URL would not need to be manually added in the editor with each screenshot. This automation can be configured in GoFullPage’s “Options”.
Another helpful premium feature is GoFullPage’s “Smart Page Splitting” capability. When the screenshot is saved as a PDF, the image will be scanned and page breaks will be placed so that text isn’t cut by the page break. This feature can be configured and selected in “Options”, though it is activated by default for premium users:
For more on “Smart Page Splitting”, please refer to this GoFullPage blog post about printing articles.
We are glad to see our extension is useful to freelance writers because freelancers are the backbone of the publishing industry and everything we enjoy reading! Happy screenshotting, and don’t hesitate to write into our customer support channel with any questions or comments.
Helpful links
If you are looking for a top-notch consulting agency that specializes in content creation and strategy within the lifestyle space, check out Kelly’s agency: At the Crosswalk! To contact or follow Kelly, you can visit her website, Twitter or Instagram.
To download our free app: GoFullPage for Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge
To try our Premium Editor: https://gofullpage.com/premium
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