Post Preview
One of the blogs I’ve been reading for a few months now just had a post about partial vs. full entries on blog front pages. Since I have some opinions on the subject, I decided to comment. My response turned into something sufficiently content-full that I decided that my blahg would be a better place for it. Sorry, Chris :P
First of all, my blog doesn’t support partial post display because… technical reasons. (The sinking feeling of discovering a design mistake in your code really resonated with me about this exact thing.) With that said, I don’t think that partial display is necessarily bad. I feel like any reasonable (this is of course subjective) blogging software should follow these rules:
- if we’re displaying a atom/rss feed, display full post
- if we’re displaying a single post, display full post
- if the post contains magical marker that denotes where to stop the preview, display everything above the marker
- display full post
I really dislike when the feeds give me the first sentence and I have to click a link to read more. At the very least, it is inconvenient, and in extreeme cases it feels outright insulting.
I think the post-by-post-basis Chris suggests is the way to go, but in the absence of a user-defined division point I would display the whole thing.
Do I write many posts where I wish I could use this magical marker? No. If that were the case, I’d make supporting this a higher priority. However, there have been a handful of times where I believe that the rest of the post is uninteresting to…well…just about everyone and it is really long. So long, that you might get bored trying to scroll past it. (If you are reading my blahg, I don’t want you to be bored because you had to scroll for too long to skip over an entry — you are my guest, and I am here to entertain you.) This is the time I believe displaying a partial post is good.
I’m hoping that eventually I’ll wrestle with my blogging software sufficiently to eliminate the technical reasons preventing me from introducing and processing this special marker. Not that you’ll really notice anything different. :)