The GMG Readers Spoke And We’re Listening- Changes Based On Your Feedback…

Many readers (and some of our own contributors) had made comments that the long scrolling posts sometimes are annoying, especially if that particular type of post is not one that interests that particular reader.  I get that it could be an annoyance to some who want a perfect blog reading experience.   The amount of time and energy our contributors put into their daily posts is really remarkable, especially considering that all of their time is donated.  Most of the music and food posts are very very long arduous tasks to complete and of course they are so detailed that they take up a lot of space and scrolling time.

In reference to Sista Felicia’s posts, having step by step visual photos of each process in the creation of a dish on a pretty much daily basis is a gift.  If you look back she hasn’t pimped her book in almost a month while providing a ton of detailed recipes, cooking tips, home decoration projects, bird feeder projects, ect, ect, ect.  Now that being said, I understand that if you could care frickin less about recipes or home decoration projects, then scrolling through her long posts about those subjects could be a minor annoyance. 

So my friend Bill O’Connor had sent in some code that we were trying to figure out how we could use to truncate the longer posts like the recipes and the music posts so that it would lead with a teaser and then include a link below the teaser photo which, when clicked, would open the entire post for those who DO want to see the recipe in it’s entirety or view the entire Gloucester music daily lineup.

The code that Bill had sent wasn’t working but it got me to thinking that there must be a way to truncate these long posts.  So I went back to my early days of creating the blog and when I wanted to change the way the blog was presented I’d research the blog help forums for days on end til I’d found a solution.  Lo and behold it was there, in the help section-

Support

Writing & Editing

Splitting Content » More Tag

You can truncate your blog entries so that only the first part of certain posts is displayed on the home and archive pages. When you do this, a link will be placed directly after your excerpt, pointing the reader to the full post.

You can find the More Tag button in the first row of the visual editor toolbar or by pressing Alt+Shift+T:

So now Felicia’s recipe that might have consisted of ten photos and text in between each photo, or Joann Souza or Peter and Vickie Van Ness’ music schedules, can be presented in a much cleaner fashion of one or two photos and give the ability for those people who crave those longer detailed posts a way to view them in entirety while the readers who would just assume skip over them,a much easier time scrolling past.

So when you see the “Continue reading” link at the bottom of a post, you know there’s much more to that post which you can access when you click the link.

I hope you know we aren’t complacent and are always striving to make GMG the best it can be.  And part of that is listening to constructive criticism and acting when I feel it’s in the best interest of the GMG community.

Thanks for reading.  I am honored that you have taken the time to look at our blog out of the bajillion of options that are out there on the internet for you to click on.  We won’t stop trying to bring you the very best content we can and earn your viewership loyalty.

Have a great day

Joey

Thanks to Bill O’Connor as well for leading me down the right path as well