Show/hide links for Blogger.com: Take a peek at a new TKC feature!!!



I use the old school version of Blogger because it's reliable, easy to use and I fear change. But recently, I've found a way to incorporate "show/hide" links into this template and the info contained in this post might help other blogs make their front page just a bit more readable as well.

Now, back in the day when the blogger help page was useful, they provided some info on this practice and their page on the subject is still the best place to start.

Thing is . . . The disadvantage of their method is clear: "Only the title of each post is displayed, with no summary information. The feature is applied to all posts, rather than letting you selectively apply it (for instance, only on long posts)."

That's why I never implemented their solution. But the workaround I discovered is much better. To start, I just followed their first step when it came to the CSS and the style sheet:



Also, the Javascript they provided is part of the solution as well when placed in between the "head" tags (hehe):



Now, the best part of the solution is that it's now up to the blogger's discretion when to run the script via a "span" link!!!

Like so:



The best part about this is that the original post where I found the majority of this instruction is set for Blogs using the very latest that blogspot.com has to offer. Use the "view source" info on the guy's blog and his solution is clearly elegant.

So far, the simple hack seems to work great and should benefit users because they don't have to scroll as much. Also, unlike The Pitch and The Star, I'm not trying to artificially boost page count by having readers go to the post page just to continue browsing and I think once again this method that I'm using demonstrates that only bloggers really care about the overall experience of online reading while newsies are simply slaves to their corporate masters and obviously are more interested in phony circulation numbers.

Additionally, since the script set up to use this feature is in the Stylesheet and CSS there shouldn't be any screwups with search engine indexing which is always a concern for any serious blogger . . . In fact, this solution is much simpler than I thought it would be . . .

This minor adjustment for TKC is something I wanted to implement for a long time and I can only hope that other bloggers wanting to make their front pages more user friendly will find this information somewhat helpful.

UPDATE: The experiment worked, these instructions are solid. However, I didn't really like what I ended up with and I think that simply putting effort into being as captivating as possible is far more important than web tech. So, as always, I'm going to try and make my writing tighter rather than counting on javascript tricks to compensate.

Comments

  1. If you are trying to destroy our eyesight there are more pleasurable ways to do it. Can you kick the font size back up?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Additional note: Don't forget to use different made up "Span" numbers every time for the Post ID!!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Too much inside baseball info ... needs more ass.

    ReplyDelete

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