Expandable Post Summaries for Professional Blog Design

With little bit of modifications to your Blogger Beta template you can easily implement expandable post summaries in your blog main page. Expandable posts gives very professional and elegant look to your blog. You can hide most of the detailed content from main page and display them when the page of the post is opened. If you observer my blog, voting widgets are displayed on my post links and not in my main page. Also, most of the images in my posts are shown only in the actual post links only. Moving bandwidth intensive content to posts’ pages loads your main page very fast.
Let us see the steps to be followed for modifying the template to implement this.
Log in to your blogger account select Layout of the blog which you want to modify.

1. Navigate through Template –> Edit HTML


2. Take backup of your template by clicking Download Full Template. This backup will help you if you want to revert to old template.


3. Search for ]]></b:skin> in your template HTML and paste the below code in between ]]></b:skin> and </head>

Click Here To Get The Code:D




4. Save your template and click on select Expand Widget Templates.


5. Search for <data:post.body/> in the template HTML and paste the below code after <data:post.body/>

<!-- Code to show "Read the rest of this entry >> " Link (Begin) -->

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != "item"'>

<span>

<a expr:href='data:post.url' style='color:#0000FF; text-align:right; font-weight:bold; text-decoration:none'>Read the rest of this entry &gt;&gt; </a>


</span>

</b:if>

<!-- Code to show "Read the rest of this entry >> " Link (End) -->






6. That’s all. Your template is modified to show expandable posts.


7. Now in every post, the content which you want to show only in post’s page should be included between <span class=”fullpost”>This will be shown only in post’s page</span>.remenmbering code every time is not easy for every one ,so for this also there is one trick .


8. Go to Setting>> Formatting Scroll down yours cursor and put below code in Post Template.
   
   

   <span class="fullpost">
   
   </span>




Another thing you must have to care about that is the part of post you want to show in home page is writen above <span class="fullpost"> and the part you do not want to show in homepage is written below<span class="fullpost"> as shown in below image.;)



9. Post a test article using that HTML to see your blog working as expected!

Posted in: Blogging Hacks,Posts