Blog Excerpts

Got a Wordpress blog homepage that seems to scroll on forever? You’re either just righting (sic) way too much or else you need to tweak your settings.

To display just teasing snippets from each post on the blog homepage you can use the excerpt tag in place of the the_content tag.

Open the Main Index Template from your theme editor and scroll to the entry <?php the_content(__(’(more…)’)); ?> (the contents of the parentheses may be slightly different.

Comment out that phrase and add <?php the_excerpt(); ?> in its place and save the template file. If saving isn’t possible you need to drop out to your FTP client and use the CHMOD command to change the permissions to make the file writeable. Then try again. Now, when you open your index page you will have ten snippets the titles of which link to the actual full posts.

If you want to add that “more…” or “Read on…” or something similar add this line immediately after <?php the_excerpt(); ?>

<a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>”>Read more…</a>

You can also change the number of excerpts/posts that display on the homepage to reduce scrolling overload. Ten is default but five is nice and crisp. This time navigate to the Wordpress admin Options, Reading and change the value of “Show at most” to whatever you think will suit your site and click update options to save the new setting. While you’re on that page you might also change the newsfeed settings to show full posts for readers who grab the rss or atom feed for your site. It has been proven time and again to actually bring in more rss subscribers and thence visitors to a site.