Excerpts, complete posts, and fancy steps

June 19th, 2007 · by David Bradley

A perennial problem for bloggers is whether or not to display complete posts on their blog’s homepage, aside from SEO duplicate content issues, there is the problem of making the homepage so long that it takes a half hour just to scroll to the bottom to see the earliest post. Wordpress has a built in php function “the_excerpt” that helps with this. It allows you to display the introductory clips from your most recent posts and direct readers to follow a “Read on…” or “more…” link to the full story on its own page.

One plugin, the_excerpt_reloaded allows you to customise how this works and to just a special piece of code the “more” tag to break posts on an ad hoc basis at a suitable point in your text. But, that means manually choosing where to make the break and remembering to do it with each post. Much better, possibly, is the fancy excerpt plugin, which makes the break automatically at the end of a sentence rather than mid-flow.

None of this, of course, answers the question, “should I or shouldn’t I?”, display full posts or not. What do you think, would you prefer fewer but complete posts on the homepage instead of half a dozen or so excerpts?

4 responses so far ↓

Wayne Smallman // Jun 19, 2007 at 8:11 pm

I think you should, if only as an experiment.

The act of reading is as subject to usability as a button or a menu.

People scan the first couple of lines and make a snap decision there & then.

So your article either sinks or swims based on that quick, cursory glance.

That said, you’re asking people to click on something .. gasp!

Considered a cardinal sin by some.

So long as this doesn’t affect your RSS subscribers, give it a whirl…
David Bradley // Jun 19, 2007 at 10:05 pm

You probably already noticed I opted for full text already…

…the site has had more traffic this week so it obviously works better for some people. We’ll see.
Hsien Lei // Jun 22, 2007 at 11:32 am

Definitely full text for me with something below the fold only if the post is exceptionally long or there is a surprise or bonus info in addition.
David Bradley // Apr 1, 2008 at 3:05 pm

Unfortunately, the excerpt_reloaded fails with the latest upgrade to Wordpress (v 2.5) and so I’ve reluctantly had to deactivate and remove it from the install. Happily, there is an alternative, that’s actually easier to use Advanced Excerpt and although the plugin author doesn’t claim to have tested beyond version 2.2.2 it works just fine!

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