Display only excerpts of articles on the blog homepage

The homepage of a Hypotheses blog can display the entire articles, one after the other, or only excerpts. In the sense of the Hypotheses articles, the excerpt refers to the part of the text that is located before the “Read more” block.

Why insert a “Read More” block in articles?

It is considered good practice to insert this block into the articles, except maybe for very short ones, for several reasons:

• A series of excerpts rather than full texts on the homepage of your blog gives the reader a better overview of the content you offer and better reflects the activity of your blog. Indeed, depending on the settings you have made in Settings > Reading > “The pages of the site must display at most [x] articles”, the homepage, categories, tags and authors pages of your blog display a fixed number of articles, whether they are whole or in the form of excerpts. Similarly, on the category, tag or author pages of a blog, a series of excerpts makes it easier to find the desired article and navigate through the blog (no need to scroll the screen very long to find the link to the next page) and faster (the loading time of a series of excerpts being less important than for a series of articles displayed in their entirety).
• Encouraging readers of your blog to read an article on the article page rather than in the feed of articles on the homepage, category, label or author page allows the administrators of the blog to obtain more precise information on consultation statistics. If the “Read more” block is not used, readers can read the entire contents of the blog from its homepage, which can lead to statistics that are mainly concentrated on this page to the detriment of individual articles, without being able to know which ones have been consulted the most. Similarly, sharing buttons on social networks and comments are only accessible on each article page at the bottom of the text.

How to insert a “Read More” block in an article?

Adding a “Read more” block introduces a dotted line labeled “MORE”. The block appears in the text editor but the mention does not appear on the published post.

Automatic excerpts, the particularity of the Hueman graphic theme

The Hueman graphic theme only displays article excerpts on the homepage, categories, tags or authors pages of a blog, whether or not the author of the blog has inserted a “Read More” block. Hueman allows blog administrators to choose the length of the excerpts to display in the blog feeds: to do this, go to your blog dashboard > Appearance > Customize > Front page content > in “Article summary”, set the size of the excerpt.

It would therefore be tempting, when this graphic theme is used, to no longer insert a “Read More” block in your articles. However, the insertion of this block remains a good practice even with the use of the Hueman graphic theme, since in the event of a subsequent change of graphic theme, if the new chosen theme does not include this automatic excerpt feature, the excerpts would have to be inserted by hand into all the articles published before the change.

Note that if a “Read more” block is inserted in a post before the excerpt length limit set in the Hueman graphic theme customization, the excerpt displayed in the articles feed will be cut to the “Read more” block. If the “Read more” block is inserted in a post after the extract limit length set in the Hueman graphic theme customization, this limit length is valid.

Featured Image: Portal of the day by Matt Green under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license

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