Truncating Posts

I'm no expert, but I will share my experience for anyone who wants to shorten posts and create a "more" link. I think blog pages look much better when they are streamlined, so I messed around with Blogger help and some hacker sites to give my posts a "read more" sort of feature.

Blogger Help has an article on Expanding Posts. The link won't work--probably because it's something a member uses...anyhow, here's how Blogger has it categorized if you want to search the HELP contents for how to do this:

How can I create expandable post summaries?

Thing is, like all of my experiences with this sort of thing, it didn't exactly work. I'm going to give you some tips if you decide to try it.

1. There was no "backup" button like Blogger said there was, so I copied and pasted it into Notepad in case I needed the original code. It turns out that there are only two changes, so when I messed up, I just deleted on the template and never did use the backup.

2. Tip: what came in VERY handy was you can hold down the CONTROL key and hit F the same way you do in Word to find the code you want! So, when the instructions say to find such and such, just search it. Still...see #3

3. I couldn't find where they were telling me to put the code, so I messed with different places, and found it would work if you put it after the part near the top where it has my template info after a dashed line. (Sorry, I couldn't put the example on this post because it would read the code!)

4. One HUGELY annoying thing you can't really help is that it's going to put the "read more" tag on every, single post, even the ones where you don't have more. The only fix is to type in END OF POST on your posts if they don't continue. I think it's crummy, but it is what it is. It's early in the semester, so I went ahead and edited my posts for it to be on all of them, but from now on I will have to remember to add it to short posts....OR, I can just expect that an interested person who clicks might find there's nothing more to see.

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