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Sunday 12 March 2006

Blogger: show only excerpts from long posts






Shay wanted to know about how to manually cut certain long posts on Blogger, with a "read more.." or similarly-named link (possibly with definable link text) to the full-text post (i.e. the permalink of the post page or item page).

As Shay says, Blogger do suggest a way to implement expandable post summaries on their help page, but unfortunately that adds a "read more" link to all your posts, whether you've actually cut them or not. If you want to be selective about it and show some posts in full, but show other, longer, posts only in summary form (i.e. just excerpts from the post, like the first few words or paragraphs), with a link your readers can then click to see the whole post, how do you do it?

Well other people have already worked it out so, rather than re-invent the wheel I'll just point you to The Little Master's post on expandable posts which links to a couple of possible methods. (Also, if you want the "read more..." link to appear in the middle of the post, as TLM did, take a look at this post, and the solution suggested by Kirk a.k.a. redryder52, all hail to him as usual!) You can see it in action on TLM's blog, e.g. his January 2006 archive (the Intelligence Quotients post), for instance.

I don't employ any of those methods myself. I thought about it a while back when I was starting to blog, as I was conscious my posts were often long, but I decided that it was more convenient for my readers to be able to see the full post. There's always the scroll bar... If however anyone disagrees and would prefer me to use the "cut" method for my longer posts, please let me know.


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9 comments:

ChickyBabe said...

I don;t like tham much and I considered them once long ago. The less I have to click the better.

Shay said...

Thanks for this..!

You rock rock rock.
Rock?

Rock!



Yes.

Anonymous said...

I vote for the full post too.

And I agree, Imp rawks! :-)

Improbulus said...

Thanks for the comments, I agree - long but less clicking is best!

Improbulus said...

Hey, thanks for the comments.

Let's all rawk! :D

Improbulus said...

Thanks for your comment Atul. Long posts do make loading a bit slower, but I don't think text makes a huge difference unless there's an excessive amount of it - it tends to be large pics etc that really slow things down.

Anonymous said...

well it was nice but when i try it to my own , i lost everything on the sidebar, maybe i need alittle more tweaking. thanks anyway..Also im new to blogging so maybe i can get a little more help.. :)

Anonymous said...

I think i will have to put up a poll on my blog and let my readers decide for me whether I will have to use excerpts or not

Improbulus said...

Hershey, try the Blogger Help Group. Good luck!

AZ - asking readers for their views can be helpful. I did it myself, some time ago, to help me prioritise topics to blog.