Read More/Post Summaries Now Available In Blogger!!

One of Blogger's most requested features has been the ability to summarize our posts on home and non-item pages using some sort of "Read More" function.

I'm thrilled to announce today that the Blogger Team have now enabled this for us to summarize our posts! No more laborious editing of the post HTML or template codes is required to display only summaries on our home pages :)



The easiest way to test this new function is to use Blogger's new post editor, either by creating your blog posts through Blogger in Draft or by enabling this through the Settings>Basic tab of your dashboard.

Once enabled, you should see a new button on the toolbar to insert a "Jump Break". Place your cursor where you would like the jump break to start in your blog post.

If you prefer not to use the new post editor, you can simply insert <!--more--> in the place where you would like the jump break to appear.

On non-item pages, a link to the full post will appear using the text "Read more >". If you prefer to change this to something more suited to your style, you can change this wording on the Layout>Page Elements section of your dashboard by clicking the "Edit" link for your Blog Posts gadget:

Those of us who have customized our Blogger templates will probably need to edit the Blog Posts section of the template in order to add the code required for this new Read More function.

The Blogger Team have added some instructions for adding this function to our templates on this page. Note: this currently refers to Classic Templates, though the actual code presented is for use with Blogger Layouts (gadgetized) templates.

I'll update this post with further instructions and more information about this great new feature as soon as I've had more time to test and experiment myself ;)

In the meantime, check out the announcement post on Blogger Buzz or Blogger in Draft to learn more about Blogger's implementation of Read More.