If you're using the Blogger.com blogging platform (or something like it), like I am for this blog, you might be frustrated by the fact that your home page displays each article in its entirety, instead of excerpting like most other blogging platforms do. There are actually several ways that you can excerpt in Blogger.com so that each post displays a portion of the text, then has a "read more" type of link. (Some of these methods apply to other free platforms as well.)

1. Blogger.com's own documentation says that you can excerpt posts using two methods. I tried one, which uses HTML "class" attributes in a <div> or <span> tag, and is supported by CSS stylesheets. It worked. For all of a few minutes. In some browsers. Then it stopped working in all of them. I've never figured out why, because I didn't change any code before it stopped working. Theoretically, this is a very simple way of doing it, which should work.
2. Manual edit of home page. Provided that you are using Blogger.com to manage your blog on your own domain rather than a free blogspot.com domain, you can use this method. First, make sure you have "post pages" enabled. This means that every entry you post to your blog will have its own .html page, as well as appear on the home page. Now change your main page to some name other than index.html, say blogger.html. Download index.html to your computer, edit each post into excerpt mode, and a "read more" link to the appropriate page. This, of course, is a nuisance, and has to be done every time you add a new post. (You probably rarely delete a post, but depending on how recent it is, you'd have to follow suit.)
3. Manually create abstracts on your home page. An abstract is different than an excerpt. For an abstract, you write a short summary of the post, which is handy if you're prone to writing longer posts like myself. (This is an informational site, so by nature my posts are longer.) The abstracting method is great if you're running a hubsite as well as a one or more blogs. So on your website's home page, you display an abstract of the latest 2-5 articles, with "read more" links to the permanent/ post pages. This method is completely manual. Every time you post to your blog, you'll have to update the list of abstracts.
4. Massage your RSS/ Atom web feed from XML into HTML using a service like Feedburner or Feed2JS, and insert the resulting HTML into your home page, a web page, or another blog's sidebar. This is the method I use on the homepage of my hubsite, Chameleon Integration.

Of course, you could always move your blog to a new platform, if you feel you've outgrown Blogger.

(c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/

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