This morning, I logged into Blogger just to add Neatnik's and my latest literary conquests. While I was doing so, I thought that I would make a minor edit to the way Neatnik's Books is formatted. I wasn't able to do exactly what I wanted to do but it was a minor enhancement so not a big deal. During my swim through the great swamp of new design features, I saw one that I liked: the Read More feature.
If you would be so kind as to scroll down a bit, you'll see that my recent posts all seem to have been truncated. Relax! No data has been lost! It is because I have inserted a
<!-- more -->break into the code of the posts. A quick edit to my blog template and customizing the tag line in a nod to the late Paul Harvey, and I was in business.
I think I like the After Jump Summaries option engaged. It is like a cliff-hanging paragraph at the end of a chapter; one that improves the load time of the home page since the bulk of the text and images aren't loaded all at once.
Though I like the concept and the fact that you can customize the post page link text, I wasn't able to use the full text I wanted for the post page link text.
Paul Harvey said, "You know what the news is, in a minute, you're going to hear ... the rest of the story." I wanted to say, "In a click, you're going to read ...the rest of the story." Blogger wouldn't accept the whole string in the text box and wouldn't tell me what the actual character limit is either.
Oh, well. "... the rest of the story..." works, too. I'll leave the jump breaks in place and see how the blog and I like it after a week or so.
Do you like post summaries or do you find them frustrating? Do you use them on your own blog?
Posts
2 yarns:
Well, jump summaries only come into play when someone comes to your blog at large, not to a specific post, like people using feedreaders do. So... it always seemed like a lot of fuss to me. But maybe it would be helpful for huge posts like linkity...
Coming in late - my apologies, I'm working on catching up!
I read blogs using the Google Reader. It is too much effort to bookmark all of the sites and make an effort to check if there is anything new on any frequent basis - it would take up my whole day!
As a result, I can see this story from both sides. On one hand, looking at it from a reader's opinion, the process is much quicker and more hassle free if there is not previews- I like to see the full text appear right within the reader. That being said, as a blogger, I know that if people are reading your blog via reader it will not always show up properly in your statistics. Thus, it is a double-edged sword.
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