Earlier this week I discussed the Thumbnails for Excerpts Plugin, which adds thumbnails to the excerpts in all of your archives.
Today I want to discuss an alternative that doesn’t require additional plugins. This is the Excerpts field on your Write > Post page. What? What Excerpts Field? Kim, what are you talking about?
Go to Write > Post and scroll down to the “Advanced Options” section near the bottom. One of the areas is called Excerpts and is just a blank field (that is way too small but that’s another topic). The description says, “Excerpts are optional hand-crafted summaries of your content. You can use them in your template”. Umm … ok. What this means is that whatever you write in this field will replace the default excerpts used by WordPress.
If you use excerpts for your archives, and most templates do, your custom content will appear when you use this field.
I can think of two ways to use this. Maybe my awesome readers will think of others and tell me about them in the comments.
- If you use the more tag and don’t post the full article on the front page (this is when you see “Read the rest of this entry” or on my site “Continue”), you could copy all of the content before the more tag in the optional excerpt field. This would provide more information in your archive entries.
- The other option is to write new content for the excerpt; something funny or clever that will entice the reader to find out what the article is about. Of course, this will take more time, which most of us don’t have because we aren’t full time bloggers but it only needs to be a sentence or two. Another issue with this is do you start writing the original excerpt with the current entry or go back and do it for all your older posts too? I would be compelled to write them for all of my posts because I’m fussy that way but then I only have 80 something posts. If I had 1000, I wouldn’t even consider it. (Speaking of the number of posts – how should I celebrate my 100th post? It’s coming up soon.)
To demonstrate the 2nd usage, I wrote a short excerpt for this post and it can be viewed under September 2008.
So, what do think? Are Optional Excerpts worth it? Do they enhance the archives? Or is it too much extra work? Personally, I think writing a unique excerpt for each post could be a lot of fun. Additionally, it creates unique content, which can be indexed by google.
photo credit: mahima_hada
Kim,
I never used this feature ever since it was introduced in WP – it was n’t there before 2.2 or so right?
I guess, this is one area where you can bundle your keywords to SEO optimize. At the same time, this optimization will not be relevant for the single posts (which are the most ‘searched for’ and ‘hit’ entities).
Personally speaking, I wouldn’t write anything more than the post content myself… Pls let me know if you could find a couple of blogs that use excerpts so that I can study its usage…. you never know, perhaps they have other usages as well?
Cheers,
Ajith
Ajith Edassery’s last blog post – 10 things that rub your blog visitors the wrong way!
HI Ajith,
I don’t recall when it was introduced. I didn’t use WordPress much before 2.3, I used to be a Movable Type user ;-)
Do you remember the layout tutorial that we were looking at last week? I think that type of layout would use that type of post. For example, you could have a “featured post” that stays at the top of the page by using excerpt in a loop rather than content. You could put the content in that field and then you would have the “feature”. Someone showed me how they did this yesterday,
Also, by using an optional excerpt the archives/category pages would have original content and would not have to be excluded with All in One Seo or robots.txt. These pages could then be included in page rank.
http://www.seocrunch.com/use-excerpts-in-wordpress-to-get-category-pages-ranked/
It seems that google may also be using the Optional Excerpt field in their blog search.
I don’t have any examples of sites that are currently using Optional Excerpts in their archives but if I find any I will let you know.
Thanks Kim… yep, I guessed so (excerpts being used in those magazine or ‘mostly excerpt on home’ kind of themes. The problem is for those blogs which has their WP DB not having excerpt fields. Once they upgrade, excerpts are applicable only for those new posts right?
I need to do some research on this as I am really thinking of an altogether different user experience for the blog readers. At the moment, they are forced to learn a few things on how to use a blog. The idea should be to get rid of all redundancies and present just as much as the user wants.
Cheers,
Ajith
Ajith,
I’m not sure what you mean about the database not having excerpt fields – I checked mine and there is a field for it and there is content in it for the the posts in which I have used this field. Do you think there is a problem when the theme is changed?
I agree that making the layout user friendly is very important – it is hard to determine what people want and expect.
And I just learned something new, because I never knew that existed before. I’d probably have to go with something catchy, since I like showing all the content of my posts on my main site. Thanks for the idea!
Mitch’s last blog post – $100 Million Dollar Challenge
Hi Mitch,
I still want to add Optional Excerpts to all of my posts so they have different content and can then be indexed by google. So far, I’ve only been adding it to the new ones. It is some extra work but some fun can be had with that field.
I’m so glad that you learned something and that you stopped by and commented.