Post Excerpts with ‘Read More’

A Holy Grail of blogging that everyone seems to be looking for is the infamous expandable post summary hack that makes use of what has become known as the “read more…” link. The purpose of this hack is to make your post appear as just a short summary on your main page (usually the first paragraph or two), and the rest of the post will be invisible until you click on the “read more” link.

That way your main page will show only a teaser of your posts so that your readers can conveniently sift through the contents of your blog and decide what they want to read (much like how the front page of a print magazine or newspaper is designed). It also serves the purpose of keeping your main page less cluttered, allows you to show more posts and keeps it at a manageable size.

After clicking on the “read more” link it will then show the remainder of the post. Of course Wordpress users have a plugin that they can use to accomplish the same task, but for the purposes of this post we will be dealing specifically with only ‘New’ Blogger users.There are various ways of doing this. One way is called the “peek-a-boo” method where the rest of the post will open up on the main page itself. A lot of people like this method because of the cool way in which it works. I also call it the “ooh and aww” method because like magic the remainder of the content will appear right before your eyes.I once used that method myself until I realized the importance of the post page and its purpose. You can read more about this at my post “Make Your Blog Post Pages More Effective“.SO I redesigned my template to use a different method that would take my readers to the post page. You can try it out yourself if you click on the “continue reading” link that you will find in some of my longer posts (please note that you will only see it on my main page).InstaBLOKE reader Rhys Postlewaight had asked me to demonstrate how to do this but at the time I was succumbing to illness and Blogger was switching over to the Beta version.When I started futzing around with my New Blogger template I was soon presented with the problem that the hack would no longer work. Personally I would rather write these days than play around with code so I called on a friend of mine Ramani to help me out.Being the nice guy that he is Ramani obliged and modified the code to work with the New Blogger. You can read more about how to implement it over at his blog the Hackosphere.

So this weekend I decided to take it for a test drive and lo and behold it works exactly as advertised right out of the box. Although I would recommend against it for reasons already expressed, he also offers the peekaboo method if you are so inclined.

I hope you enjoy this hack.

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P.s.: Sorry Rys for being late with this.