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I chatted with a student about her blog and discovered the one thing that she hated most about blogs: long blog entries with paragraph after paragraph after paragraph on the first page where the reader is forced to scroll down just to get to the next blog entry. Ugly. Imagine if newspapers printed whole stories, column after column with no break before presenting the next story. That would make for an uninteresting front page. Most readers would never get to the next article. It’s the same with blogs.
This student actually wanted to put her work into old school static web pages, because she wanted greater control of how her work would look in the front page. She didn’t want it to look like a boring list of endless boring paragraphs. That was until she discovered what the “MORE” tag could do.
By using the “More” tag your blog can go from the “long endless paragraph” look to something more visually appealing with each blog entry consisting of a single opening paragraph and graphic and a “click here for more” link if you want to read further. Much more visually interesting and very simple.
iWeb Users:
Before I get too far into this let’s look at the iWeb way of doing the same thing. Put simply, there is no “MORE” tag in iWeb. You have something much simpler. It’s called “Excerpt Length.”
iWeb blogs have the “blog page” view, the “blog entries” view and the “blog archives” view. The blog page view is like the blog list view previously mention. The blog entries view is similar to the entry editing view and the blog archives view is the list view with just the entry titles. When you are in the blog page view, go to the inspector window. Click on the RSS button. Select Blog. Under the Blog Main Page heading you’ll see Number of excerpts to show and under that a horizontal slider bar marked Excerpt Length. If the slider is all the way to the left only the blog entry titles will be shown (like the archive view). If the slider is all the way to the right than the whole blog entry will be shown on the main blog page (boring!). Select which setting works best for you. I usually set mine to show the blog entry’s image and a few lines of the first paragraph.
“MORE” Tag How-To
If you use an online web editor, there is usually a visual view (sometimes called “RTF”) and an HTML (code) view. There may be a button somewhere with the Bold and Italic options that might simply say “More.” Here’s an example of the “MORE” button used in WordPress, follow by an example of the “MORE” tag in an HTML view (right).
In some stand-alone blogging clients, such as the one that I use, Ecto, there are literally two windows, the top window for the text and media that will go into the main blog page and the bottom window for the text and media that will be served up to the reader when they click the “Read More” link. Simple.
My student asked, where does this “Read More” link go to? She teaches HTML so she’s used to the idea that links go to another page where the whole blog entry is posted. Here’s one of the beauties of blogging software, when the “Read More” link is clicked it doesn’t go to another page but it automatically creates the blog page with the top and bottom parts and the viewer is set to begin reading just after where the “Read More” button was. It’s very different from the “roll-your-own” days of static pages where content and layout were all part of the web page. The “More” tag works because the content being created by the blog writer is completely separate from what the blog reader will later see. I like to think that my content is being stored in this giant database and that the reader sees a friendly front-end that serves up the content that they want to read and not a long list of rambling paragraphs (even though that’s what I’ve written here … long lists of rambling paragraphs).
Less Is Not MORE
Alas, all is not good in Blogsville. Not all blogs use the “MORE” tag. LiveJournal uses a confusing lj-cut button. After you’ve written the whole blog entry you first select the part of the blog entry that you want to follow after the Read More link, then you click the lj-cut button. The selected text is grayed-out and hidden behind the Read More link when you save and publish the entry. Confusing.
SquareSpace doesn’t use the “More” tag either. But it does offer an excerpt option similar to LiveJournal, where one selects the text (and image) that one wants to show on the front page, select the “Define Excerpt” button, and one now has a blurb on the front page with a “Read More” option, which is SquareSpace’s version of the “More” button.
Alas, one of the most popular blogging platforms used in emdt (besides iWeb), Blogger does NOT offer any kind of Read More option in their web-editor. Blogger was such a blogging standard that I’m sure there should be a way to do the “Read More” thing using a stand-alone editor, but it wasn’t worth further exploration. Too bad.
The “More” tag could be your friend. With it you could stop punishing and chasing away your readers by giving them a more visually inviting front page to your blog. That’s a good thing.
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