15 Use selective post summaries in New Blogger June 26, 2007 /

Thanks to Hackosphere's excellent Blogger hack, I've now been able to use selective post summaries in some of my lengthier posts! Phew, what a relief! I hated having such long posts taking over my blog pages. Instead, you can now see summaries of each post and choose to read the whole post by clicking the "Read more..." link instead. This way, you can find the information you need more easily, and scan posts on my front page without having to go through every other post first! Would you like to include this hack in your own Blogger blog?

To use this particular hack, you need to be using the Blogger "Layouts", rather than the classic (old) Blogger template. Make a backup of your template by going to Layouts>Edit HTML>Download full template in your Blogger dashboard. Then hop on over to Hackosphere's post and follow the instructions to the letter!

It took me a couple of attempts to get this right; my advice is to copy and past the code provided, as any extra spaces or line breaks could prevent the hack from working. Be sure to insert the code provided in your post template too, to ensure all future posts have the correct formatting.

Once you've installed the necessary code, you can choose whether to make your new posts expandable or not.

• If you choose to write a long expandable post, write the first paragraph before the < id="fullpost"> and continue afterwards.
• If you choose to write a shorter, non-expandable post, only write before the first < span > tag.

You can also edit previous posts to make them feature expandable summaries, by inserting <span id="fullpost"> after your first paragraph, and </span> at the end of your post.

A truly great Blogger hack as I'm sure you'll agree. Thanks Hackosphere for sharing this!

Technorati Tags: blogger+hacks expandable+posts read+more selective+expandable+posts blogger templates customisations