Nostalgia for MoveableType excerpt feature

Follow-up to Shock of the Old Conference, 2005 from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

In this entry I recall the 'show only excerpt on home page' feature of the MoveableType blogging system. I consider how this could be a way of addressing the problem that 'compartmentalizing' people have with a wide range of subjects and activities being represented in full on their blog homepage.

*My confidence in this entry:* 80%
Importance of this entry to me: 70%

Main text

Actually, nostalgia for just one particular feature of MoveableType: the ability to set up the blog homepage so that only the first part of each entry is shown on it. MT entries can have a (slightly misnamed) excerpt field. This is effectively the first part paragraph of the entry, which tends to be used as a short introduction or overview explaining what the entry is about, with the effect of giving a sense of what kind of entry it is and what kind of people should read it.

Only the excert is listed on the homepage, with a link to read more. For example, see how it is used on the Auricle blog

I liked using this for four reasons:

1. it makes the blog homepage less cluttered;
2. it encouraged me to give an overview of the entry, making more sense of it;
3. readers could quickly see which entries were of interest to them;
4. it makes it easier to keep a blog with a diverse range of types of entry and topics – readers aren't turned away by seeing one of my mad philosophy entries filling the whole front page, instead they can just read an excerpt and decide to read one of my more sensible entries.

Now that I'm using my blog for so many different reasons, including containing long well developed texts alongside random brain-dump bucket lists, the excerpt feature would be really useful.

I suspect that others have the same problem. During my Shock of the Old presentation I put forward the argument that a blog is a good place to join-up, or at least contain, aspects from the different parts of my 'spaghetti-like' life – work, academic and social. The response to this was interestingly split. Many people could see themselves doing just that. But many others would not want to combine these different aspects in one place. They are what i would call 'compartmentalisers'. They like to seperate things out. They would use a blog for a specific purpose, for example, sharing family stories and photos. But they feel uncomfortable about putting that on the same page as work. I suspect that many students have this problem with the idea of putting academic things on their blog next to their social blogging.

Obviously they could use categorisation, however, they didn't seem to think that would be enough. The entries would still appear in full together on the homepage.

But using an excerpt approach would help to alleviate that problem, and may well encourage more of those compartmentalizers to blog.

For now, I'm going to start writing a brief intro to every entry that I write, clearly identified as the 'overview', and i'll see if it makes a difference.

: 08 Apr 2005 08:52 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (6) |  Report a problem