Blogger Expandable Post Summaries

Many of my bloggers friends and blogging readers have asked me how I manage to show a small introductory part of the post on the main index page of the blog, followed by “Read more” which leads to the main full post page…

Well this is known as Expandable Post Summaries, simply put they are post summaries shown on the main page which can be expanded.

First the advantages

• This is useful if you write medium to long posts and want to show only a part of them on the front page to prevent the readers from scrolling for huge lengths.
• Readers can expand and read on for posts which they only need to read.
• This also speeds up loading of the main page, reduces clutter and also loads the sidebar faster.
• Since comments are visible on full post pages only, it is better if readers reach the full post page, rather than just see “2 comments” on the main page and then go to the post page to see the same content, just to see the comments.
• It also helps target contextual advertising services like Google Adsense or contextual Chitika ads to display more targetted ads since focused keywords of your full post help, leading to better click through rate (CTR) and you make money fast.

Now how to put code in Blogger Template
This is given with detailed instructions in the Blogger Hack help to create expandable post summaries. Note that you’ll need to have post pages enabled in order to make this feature work. It uses conditional tags to change how posts display on different pages. Note that it requires changes to the posts themselves (which is a small code that can be added easily in the post template, if you don’t want to have to type it for each post). So if you want to add it now to all posts, you have to do it manually to each of them. However, the “read more” or any other customized text link can be added in the template. You can leave the code out, if you do not want to add to some particular short post. So bloggers, give it a try in your blogging habit.