Twice in the last couple of days I've seen posts to Seekers of Perl Wisdom where the seeker has mentioned that he or she attempted to use <readmore> tags, and gave up because they appeared to not be working.

While I do not know exactly what was being tried that failed, I will speculate in the hope that I'll hit the nail on the head and help a few who haven't yet gotten used to them.

First a little background. <readmore></readmore> tags can be used if you're making a long post and wish for only part of it to be visible from the index page of its respective posting category. This is considered a common courtesy; long posts make the casual reader who wishes to just glanse over all of the posts in a category do a lot more scrolling than is considered desirable. When a <readmore> tag is introduced into your post's markup, category-page readers will see all of your post up until the tag, after which they'll see a link entitled "readmore". By clicking on the link, the rest of your post will be available.

It should be noted that readmore tags have both a start point (<readmore>), and an end point (</readmore>). You may also specify more than one set of readmore tags if you feel that the flow of your node will still be understandable with multiple portions of it tucked away out of initial view.

What I think is fouling people up is not understanding how the tag works. The readmore tags only hide the enclosed text from view on topic pages and The Monastery Gates page. By topic pages, I mean they only hide text for those people casually browsing Seekers of Perl Wisdom, Meditations, Perl Monks Discussion, and so on. But once a casual reader becomes a more serious reader by following a link directly to the node in question, all of the text will be visible; nothing is hidden. Following a link directly to a node has nearly similar effect to following that node's readmore link, except that following the readmore tag positions the reader at the appropriate place within the node.

What this means to node authors is that when a node author clicks "preview" to see his node, it will look like the readmore tags haven't done their job. Don't worry, they have. In this case, 'preview' doesn't really tell the whole story. Similarly, when a node author follows a link directly to his authored node, again it will look like the readmore tags aren't doing anything. They aren't, in this specific view. But rest assured that by placing the tags, you're doing the casual readers of section index pages a big favor.


Dave

In reply to Don't worry about previewing <readmore> tags. by davido

Title:
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