The More Tag

YOUR KEYBOARD, 20 April — To use the “more” tag, or not to use the more tag? To have a “full post” home page or an “excerpt” home page? It’s an age-old question. The blogging tradition started with full posts piled one on top of the other, much like the durational, lived experience at an archaeological site. Later, like interpretive exhibits of strata at an archaeological site, the home page filled with post excerpts evolved. Today you see lots of both. Which type are you?

If you look at the home page of I Rez, you can, no doubt, figure out which type I am. An awful lot of my friends are Full Post Home Page bloggers, so I suppose I should tread lightly here, but my structure-loving inner modernist just loves the bird’s-eye-clarity of a Excerpt Home Page, and no matter how compelling the content is, my dyslexic-or-something brain always gets a little confused with all the scrolling of post on top of post or Full Post Home Pages. So I took to the web to see what peeps out there have to say on the topic:

• Pro Blog Design
• Blog Godown
• Masterful Marketing
• Shout Me Loud

k, so now that you’ve made your choice, how do you go to Post Excerpts, if that’s your pleasure? In WordPress HTML-mode you use the “More” tag to break the content, like so:

<!--more-->

If you don’t want the default “View Full Article” for your home page links, you can actually have it say whatever you like, just by adding it to the More tag, like:

<!--more Read it all because you love me! :) -->

And then your home page will look like:

Of course, most people who aren’t me seem to prefer the visual editor to the HTML editor. Must be that structure-needy inner modernist again, anyway, in WordPress Visual mode, it’s even easier, you just hit the little MORE button, or as the tooltip suggests, Alt-Shift-T

Some themes, like my Delicious Magazine theme from the awesome peeps at Woo Themes, have a little selection box to just make all your stuff excerpts. This is pretty cool, but as you see, sticking in a More Tag is really easy even without this.

Over on Tumblr, some post formats, like Photo, don’t accept a more tag, but others, like Text, do. You’ll see pretty much the same button, or in html-mode:

[[MORE]]

So that’s the story! If you checked out any of the links above, you saw a variety of arguments for one form or the other, for me the excerpt home page is aesthetically more pleasing, and it offers a wider range of content choices so peeps have the freedom to choose which article most interests them (or is least lame! 😛

Drop me a comment and LMK what you like in a home page? What UI/UX elements make it more or less compelling for you? What aspects make it easier or harder to use for you?

Happy Blogging!