A Consuming Experience

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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