Friday, May 25, 2007

Expandable Post Summary for New Blogger

Expandable post summary is the term applied to blog posts where only short snatches (usually the first few paragraphs or sentences) are displayed with a link at the bottom that may say, usually, "Read More..." which if a reader is interested and when clicked, takes the reader to the full post.

Expandable post summary is useful if you have the habit of writing long posts. But the biggest advantage is that your blog looks neater and more reader friendly. For bloggers who monetize with their blog, this also mean a higher chance for a CTR.

There are two ways of doing it - one is pretty straight forward and the only a little more complex.

I would have use the straight forward method but unfortunately, the hack will place the "Read More..." even in short posts. Though some suggest putting the word END at the end of the short post, I still find it annoying. Therefore I opt for the more complex method.

Read about the two different methods here:
Expandable Post Summary for the New Blogger (formerly beta)
Blogger hack: Expandable posts with Peekaboo view

However the other method is not without its disadvantage. The hack has to be linked to a third party site. I'm worried that if the third party site is down, my expandable post hack will no longer work. Also, since the code is fix at that third party site, I wouldn't be able do certain modifications like editing the "Read More..." and "Summary Only..." or change the font color. I email to Ramani on my reservations on hosting the script on a third party site and below is his response:

On May 21, Ramani said...
Derek,

Lots of people have been using this hack for several months and they never face this problem. The domain is with yahoo and I pay for it. If you still have concerns, you can download it and move it to your server.
Having got some kind of assurance, I decided to implement the hack.

Currently, I'm still trying to figure out how to make the hack work without having to upload the script into a server and to do some modifications to the font color. I have email Ramani for help on this. If any blogger has a solution, please let me know. Thanks.

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