New For Beta Users: Easily Displaying Excerpts on Your Blog

A feature that we've often had requested is a way to easily display excerpts of your post on your main and archive (date-based and category) pages.  While you can set up an excerpt on a post-by-post basis with the Extended Entry option, we've created a new way to do this automatically.  Our beta team will be the first to get to see this!

If you're a member of our beta team, to find this new feature, go to Settings > Posts and scroll to the "Auto-Generated Excerpts" option at the bottom.  First, set the number of characters you'd like to use for your excerpt.  After doing this, check the "Display excerpts instead of full posts on index and archive pages" box.  You'll then get another option that - if there is a thumbnail within the post - will allow you to show a 200 pixel thumbnail of the first image in the post floated to the left of the content.  If you'd like to do this, simply check this box as well and save your changes.

Now, on your main and category pages, you'll see your posts displayed as an exceprt with a link that your readers can click to read more.

You can find out more on this in our Knowledge Base.

These features will be rolled out to all Typepad subscribers over the next few weeks. If you want to get in on it now, simply go to the Account tab and sign up for the Beta team!

Comments

[Ed Vielmetti]

I'm writing posts in Markdown, not HTML. What code do I put in to signal the break before an excerpt?

[Werner Patels]

Awesome. Just enabled it and works like a charm.

Edward.... you don't need to code anything. In the Settings > Posts, you merely enter the number of words of your excerpt. It will break after the number of words you configured.

[shady]

Oh well! Thats a good share.

[Ed Vielmetti]

Werner -

I appreciate the automated break, but sometimes I'd like a little more control.

What would be even better would be to have a break that's not a word count but instead a paragraph count. I'd love to include the lead paragraph (no matter how short or long) as an excerpt. Can't see how to do that.

[Kymberlie]

Hi Edward,

Thanks for the suggestion. We'll keep that in mind as a possible future enhancement.

If you'd like more control than the character count allows, you'd need to use the Extended Post (Post Continuation) feature and manually split each post up using this method.

Information on setting up the Extended Post is available here:
http://help.typepad.com/split_extended_entry.html

I hope this helps. Please let us know if there is anything else we can do for you.

Thanks,
Kymberlie

[Paul White]

Great!, It's really simple to use.