Wriging

I show the whole post. I don't like to click through to another page to finish reading a post. Showing half a post is like the old flash splash page.

I also leave a list of latest posts in my sub-navigation. As long as your blog titles are descriptive of the post there is no reason for a short intro or description of it.

i used to like showing the whole post, but then recently favored a more slimmed down approach.

i just get sick of the front page being so long. now, i think of my front page as sort of like the front page of a newspaper. "continue reading" is like "story continued on page A7" or something, except it's easier to click instead of flip through the whole newspaper.

I chose the summary on the front side. I figure might as well give the readers a quick browse option, and if they like the intro, then they can continue reading and click the "read more" link.

I think it should depend on your layout. On my site I only have 2 entries showing and then a list towards the bottom of smaller excerted "previews", so having longer articles isn't too bad since they'll be moved down to the preview section within a day or 2 anyway.

Well I'm not a blogger but I am an avid reader of many...I prefer to just see the short summary, that way if I am not interested in the topic, I can skip to the next topic. Having to scroll down through all that is sort of a pain....:)

I use the summary to avoid people having to scroll so much.

While I don't have advertising on my blog I know that using the 'more' tab is a good way to show targetted ads. If you place your adsense etc. just after the more (so it shows after the click) it keeps your homepage free from ads and also makes the advertisements more targetted to the topic that people are interested in (rather than using the whole homepage text to create the ad).

Thanks for all the input!

@canberraboy, I had to laugh, since just before I saw your post earlier, the thought ran through my head to add a "recent posts" list to my sidebar. I did decide to do that, so at least that's done now.

@DavidAirey, I don't have advertising either, but I will remember that for the future, or any client thing that may come up.

I'm thinking that I don't like my front page to be too long either, and I agree with stefani as well, about skipping to the next topic if I'm not interested in the ones on top. Will have to think on it all some more.

I've tried summaries plenty of times since the clean look attracts me as well. But every time I reverted to full entries. It still is easier to scroll than to click I think and I also don't want to force people who read in their feed readers to visit my blog.

That the entry is long, doesn't seem an issue. It'll be long or short whichever way you read it, won't it?

I now have one article per page and five links to recent articles at the bottom, complemented with a search field. I think that does it for me, for now.

I post the entire full post on my site but I do limit my home page and internal blog pages to 5 posts since I usually have longer posts and don't want my readers having to scroll down for miles and miles.

Personally, I'm all for full posts. I find that my eyes just slide right over summaries and I rarely click on "read more". The same goes for preferring full to partial feeds in my feed reader; if I can see the full post, I'm more likely to read it and then click through to the actual blog to comment.

I always always always as a rule cut topics after two or thre paragraphs.. regardless of length,.. this encourages discussions...

plus it increases your page loads.. if you are runnuing adsense... I think its the smartest thing to do....

I truncate the really long posts. I also truncate posts which contain extra material (changelogs, for instance) that might not be relevant to casual readers.

I also tend to hide embedded content or image collections below the fold to reduce the size of a front page load.

I think the factor which most determined whether or not to <!-- more --> is how one's front page is set up: for the average blog which displays 7 or 10 posts, it might be quite a bit of information. For blogs which highlight only the most recent post and provide links to everything else, the full content might be fine.

If it takes me more than 3 wheel spins to see the bottom of my post, I will <--more--> it... otherwise you just get to read it all on the front page :)

When I think about it people visit my site to get a big picture view of me/my site. So, I use summaries to show more on the front page. If they decide they're interested in reading on then they can but most of the time they're there to click around the site.

Scrolling = Ick.

I don't appreciate it when people want me to 'read more' after just a sentence. They've got to be known and worth the click at that point. Also, some folks (Snook, for example) have layouts that don't lend themselves to scrolling. That's totally cool if you've got something nice going on (visually).

It depends on the type of material. I run two blogs and I treat them differently. TradingWhatISee.com is an educational site for futures traders, and each night I have a large graphic (futures chart) with text explaining what happened that day. It is important to see both text and image at the same time, and following a <more> command would be distracting.

My other site is about natural history - OurWindowOnNature.com, and since it covers many different topics, I don't want to lose a reader if the first story isn't of interest to them. Many posts are short, but if it runs more than three or four paragraphs I use <more> to send them to the entire article, but still allow others to see that I have four additional topics just down the page.

I don' think there is a "correct" answer to this question - it depends too much on the content and style of the site.

Lowell

hey great discussion here, I was thinking about it too. Now I'm showing full post but only 5-7 on front page (previously 10) I also put some links to recent posts and my favorite old post (not so old) on the front page so people can see and if interested, can click on it.

I think it all depends on the type of site you are running. If you are constantly pumping out content then most users would appreciate to not show the long blog post, but if you are just posting every couple of days then I definitely think you should show everything.

You have just have to match the site with the content.

Wow, I guess I shouldn't have expected the "one answer fits all!" I can see the sense in each of these methods, really, and I appreciate you all sharing. And I'll still have to think about all awhile to figure out what to do on my own site! :)

depends on your length.
if you're doing 200-300 word posts maybe with a graphic/photo, you can post it whole.

if you're churning out 2000+ word posts, i'd suggest using the MORE tag to save readers to whom the content might not be relevant.

i've seen some blogs where there's about 5 ultra long posts running for about 12 screens and it's quite a monster to navigate through.

the content might be very rich and well worth my time reading, but i'd think bloggers would spare a thought for their readers too...

I usually trim the post at about 10 or 15 paragraphs (I don't remember off the top of my head). I want all of my posts to be visible and since only 5% or so of my posts are greater than 10 or 15 - I'm happy with making people make an extra click to read just those 5%.

Sites which clip after one or two paragraphs yet only contain three annoy the crap out of me.

I post the full entry on my photography site.

On my book site, I post a leading blurb, and link to the rest.

Show em' if you got em'.

You can get more page views by not showing the full post, which increases ad revenue....

For me, my home page is a portal page into the site. The content is designed to draw people in to read the full article. But not just the latest article...I want them to get involved in other content I have to offer, too.

to me, I personally liked it short. It's pretty much my idea of a minimalized style of design, as I find that leaving the whole entry draws your main page to a very long load, especially for me who deals with anime blogging, what if screenshots and other interesting pictures.

Loading time, to me, is very important. You can dump all the stuff beautifully in your blog but if it takes too long for your blog to load, it's useless. Hence, i hide my entries.

I show the whole post, generally. On the front page however, you only get an excerpt of the most recent post. As jonathansnook said, I have other content too. So the front page will let people dive more deeply into my site while the post permalink always gets them to the full text.

I like the mullet style design where recent one or two posts are shown in full and the others are shown either as excerpts or just titles. It provides a balance between both. Sometimes even one long post can make the home page long, but it also lets the readers read the latest post without clicking on anything else.

In my opinion it will depend on whether the site is primarily a blog or not. If there is lot of other content, showing in full might not work.

this is the 'trick' i used to do.

for long posts, i'd run a <!--more--> tag, then run an adsense block after that.
i had pretty good CTRs using that strategy.

i've now removed adsense, to position myself more strongly as a content blog.

I like to show the whole entry, no matter where someone is on the site. This is because I have a "tagline", that's highlighted in a brighter colour and different margins. It's a modified pull-quote, and I like to use these to draw a reader in.

Using WordPress, using the more tag cuts off my RSS so I show the full entry and try to keep them shorter and more concise - two entries on a page. I have seen many blogs have summaries and it works well. If WP didn't cut off my RSS, I'd probably use a summaries as well.

Summaries. I used to "let it all hang", so to speak, but I recently went to an almost all summary format for 2 reasons:

1) It looks cleaner with my theme. Super long pages are pretty annoying, and when you have 10 posts with an average word count of 1000+ words pages can get *REAL* long.

2) Better for cell phone users. My page is designed in such a way as to make it easy for someone reading the site using a cell phone to view the content without getting a "Incomplete Content Shown" message. This was precipitated by my inability to check my entire page using my cell phone, when I want to show someone something.

I go for the whole post. It would be prettying annoying, plus it will look incomplete if I just cut a drawing tutorial in half.

But I also go for less posts on the mainpage... around about 4, so the pages don't go for yonks