Display Excerpts rather than full Posts

Although we still see a lot of beginners in our seminar ‘Every RVer Needs a Blog’ many of you have been blogging regularly for a long time – like those listed on HitchItch.com.  If you’re one of those, and have a lot of posts on your Blogger blog, you may want to allow readers to see more of the headlines, rather than the full text of each post.  When using full posts, they go to your blog and have to read thru the entirety of the most current blog post before they see that there are other posts beneath it.

If you use Post Excerpts, your readers will see several posts titles and excerpts in one screenful.  Then they need to click the link to ‘Read More …’ if they want to see the rest of the post.  There are pros and cons to each type of display.  If you don’t think your readers will click the ‘Read more …’ link, then you should probably leave the full post displayed.  But, if you think your readers might read more posts if they see several ‘teasers’ at a glance, then Excerpts are for you.

If you want your blog to look similar to the image at left, here’s what you do:

The ‘Jump Break’ Tool

Blogger’s Updated Post Editor includes a button to add the break in your post.  Everything above the break will show up on the main blogger page, to see content below the break, the reader needs to click the ‘Read more …’ link.

When creating, or editing, your post – click on the Jump Break tool at the position you want the break to occur.  See the Blogger Help Page on Jump summaries.

Automatic Post Summaries

The Jump Break tool is certainly easy enough, but the problem is you need to add it to every post.  In my case, that would require editing all 1400 posts if I wanted the feature to apply to my entire blog.  I also couldn’t simply change my mind and go back to full posts.  So I kept hunting for another solution and found code for an HTML gadget to automatically display all posts in summary rather than full  post.  The author calls it Automatic Jump Breaks – bxA2.  You copy the code provided and paste it into a Blogger HTML/Javascript gadget.  Nothing will appear at the position of the gadget, but it will convert the display of your entire blog into summary format.  I tried it on my blog (www.geeksontour.blogspot.com) and it works great.

The only bad news is that this is a 3d party gadget and the website for it is no longer being maintained.  Meaning this is Use-at-your-own-Risk software. I’m going to use it for now.  I consider it an acceptable risk, but I am writing a note to myself: Dear Self, if anything starts going wrong with my Blogger blog, I will first suspect this HTML gadget and remove it.

There!  I feel better now, and I’m going to go admire my 8 year old blog that now looks completely different!