How To Add The Blogger “Read More” Expandable Posts Link

This is a pretty popular Blogger hack that lots of people have asked me about. Instead of answering to each email individually, I thought it would make more sense to write an article about it.

With this hack, you can choose to display a select amount of text from the beginning of each post as a teaser instead of showing the entire post on the front page of your blog. Then when people want to read the rest of the post, they can click a “read more” link to see the full post. This is very handy if you have lots of long articles all on one page. (Note that you’ll need to have post pages enabled in order to make this feature work.)

Step #1 - Update Your Template Code

First you need to edit your existing code so I recommend copying and pasting it into notepad or any text editor. Also, it’s smart at this point to create a backup of your template just in case something goes wrong. Now do a search (CTRL + F) within the text editor for the following code post-header-line-1. This is the default code that Blogger includes but some custom templates remove or change this code so you might have trouble finding it. If you can’t locate this text then try searching for instead. Your template will for sure have this since it’s the tag that actually prints the body of your post.

Now depending on which code you were able to find will determine how easy the next steps will be. You might need to do some detective work first in order to get this working properly in your custom template. The idea is to get this new code into your template before the tag. Keep reading and hopefully the explanation will illustrate the concept clear enough so you are able to adapt this hack to your custom template.

Add the following code below the

and

tags if you’ve got both.





The result should look something like this:

If you don’t have the default

tag then your result should look something like this instead. This is how it would be done in the MushBlue Blogger custom template:

Notice in both examples that the code in yellow and the tags are the same — it’s just tag above it that will differ based on the template you’re using.

Now let’s add one more bit of code which will actually create the “read more” link in your post. This code will go below the tag so copy the following and paste it in. Feel free to change the “Read more…” text to whatever you want the link to look like. Be careful not to delete any other code during this process.



Read more...



Yes, there are supposed to be two tags in the above code so don’t think it’ s a mistake. The result should look like this:

This code will be the same no matter what template you are using. Just make sure it goes below the as shown in the image above.

Now let’s look at what the final result should be. Here’s the updated code block you just worked on all put together:

Ok, you’re all done editing the template code. Paste it back into your Blogger html window and save it. If you get an error, you made a mistake. The most common mistake is to accidentally delete a > or <>

Step #2 - Add a Class Tag in Your Default Post Template

For this step, you need to navigate in your Blogger account to “Settings” => “Formatting” and scroll all the way down to the bottom. It’s the last option called “Post Template”. You’re going to paste in the following code:

You’ll want to keep the spaces in there which will make sense later. After you save this, it will look like this:

Step #3 - Create a New Post

Ok, we’ve got everything all setup so it’s time to go and test it out. Hopefully you’ve got a new post in mind for your blog. If not, then we’ll just create a test post which you can later delete. When you click on the “Posting” tab, you’ll notice that the post text area is now pre-populated with the and tags. If not, then you didn’t save it properly so go back and re-read step #2.

So when writing your new post, anything you put above the tag will be the teaser text. The main body of your post needs to go in between the and tags in order for the “read more…” link to work properly. See the screenshot below. Sometimes pictures illustrate better than words.

Now publish or preview your post to see the “read more” hack working on your blog. If it doesn’t show up for some reason, go back and run through the steps again. Most likely you pasted the code blocks in the wrong places. It’s difficult to troubleshoot these issues since each template can be unique so please make sure to double-check your template before asking for help in the comments section below.

Here’s the live post with the “read more…” link properly working based on the text I used above in the post text area.

Read more...

Setting the Properties of a Container

In this tutorial, you'll know the basics of what code sets the properties of a container. To make things simple, we'll look at 2 container blocks only - Main and Post. Once you know these, the basic ideas for all the other containers are pretty much the same.

Here is a sample code for the 2 containers:

#main {
margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
min-width: 400px;
max-width: 400px;
background: $mainbgColor;
color: #111111;
font: $textFont;
}

.post {
margin: 0px 20px 10px 0px;
padding: 10px 20px 10px 2px;
line-height: 1.5em;
text-align: left;
background: $postbgColor;
}

The #main and .post are the titles of each containers. Each container codes must be contained within {...}. For the explanation below, we'll focus on the codes inside the post block, especially for the explanation on the margin and padding (the codes colored in red).

• Margin - sets the distance between the border of the container to the border of a parent (larger) container outside it. There are 4 numbers defining the Margin property. The 1st number sets the top margin, the 2nd sets the right margin, the 3rd number sets the bottom margin, and the 4th number sets the left margin. It basically sets the whole margin in a clock-wise fashion starting from the top. In the case above, the parent container for the post container is the main container. See how the dashed border for the blue (post) container is placed inside the green (main) container following the post block's margin command (the codes in red). If the post's margins are all set to zero, then the post container would be exactly the same size as the main container. Think of the Margin as a command that moves its border away from a parent border. Another thing, Margin can have a negative value, which means that it moves toward the parent border and may overlap it (not away from it).
  
• Padding - sets the distance between the border of the container to the border of a child (smaller) container inside it. In the case of the post container, the child container is the post-body. The 4 numbers defining the padding sets the padding in a clock-wise fashion also, just like the Margin property. See how the post's padding puts the post-body inside the post container, away from the dashed border. Unlike the Margin, think of the Padding as a command that moves a child border away from its border. Padding values cannot be negative.
  
• Min-width and Max-width - sets the width of the container. Usually, it's enough to write it as width = 400px (for example), but it's becoming more of my habit to set the width as strict as possible, because I sometimes saw that if it's not written strictly, the container width might shrink and expand freely on some situations and in some different browsers. So by setting the width strictly, I made sure that it looks exactly like I want at all times in all browsers (basically getting rid of alignment bugs). If you look at my newer templates, I even set the width redundantly, say in Main-wrapper and then in Main containers eventhough they are pretty much the same. Doing it this way solves some alignment bugs that I saw (eventhough I don't really understand why it solves it by writing it redundantly).
• Background - sets the background color of the container. It uses the hexadecimal code for colors. See here for all the color values. You can also set a background image that repeats itself to cover the whole container block. The way to do this is by pointing to the URL of an image. For details on how to do this, see W3Schools tutorials. You can also set the value to be $samplevariable, where the variable is the one that you define in Subsection 1 in CSS Styling Structure.
• Color - sets the color of your text using the hexadecimal color code, or the variable defined earlier in Subsection 1.
• Font - sets the font of your text. You can use the variables set in Subsection 1 also. See W3Schools tutorials for more details on setting the font properties.
• Text-align - sets the alignment of your text. The 3 options are either left, center, or right.
• Line-height - sets the distance, or height, between two text lines.
  

My tutorial just gives the basic idea on some of the codes in the Blogger templates. I'd say the most important ones for a basic understanding are the margin and padding commands. If you want a more detailed explanation on CSS styling language, I recommend w3Schools CSS Tutorial as a quick and easy resource center.

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