Daniel over at Daily Blog Tips suggests leaving most of the content of a long article off the blog front page by using the “more” tag in Wordpress:

When you insert the “more” tag on a post Wordpress will display only the content that is placed before the tag, adding a “Read more” link to the post. Using this feature it becomes possible to display fully only the latest posts while making the rest display post excerpts.

I have this problem here at The Wardman Wire, because a good proportion of my articles are analytical or “How to” articles.

The author then needs to re-edit each post as it slips off the bottom of the home page, to remove the <more> tag.

Once you a write a new post you will edit the one that just slipped out of the Homepage and add a “more” tag to it.

To me this process requires too much to be done by hand. We should make the software work for us, and avoid the handiwork.

I can think of a couple of ideas, which require either a compromise or a little programming to remove the need for manual editing.

• Display a set portion of a post on your homepage. IN my view, the standard 55 words is not enough for a home page excerpt. This could be one or two paragraphs, or even a set number of letters. I have worked this way in the past, and it can be accommodated in a writing style, but needs care.
• Have a custom tag (not <more>) to indicate the point at which a post should be truncated on the front page, which would then be ignored everywhere but on the home page.

Previously Daniel has written about using Posting excerpts on the homepage, but I find that I need the flexibillity to vary the length of content between excerpts for RSS feeds and a brief version of the article for blog readers.

Perhaps this is Catch-22, and someone needs to write a plugin.

What do you think?

Tags: wordpress, better blogging, excerpt, more tag, length of article

[tags]wordpress, better blogging, excerpt, more tag, length of article[/tags]