4th & Dragon : Dungeons and Dragons...and stuff

Is there some sort of formula for how much material of an entry appears on the front page?  Does this differ by material type?  I’ve noticed, for instance, that all of the blog postings appear (except for the comments), but that the test review only has the first few paragraphs.  Now, maybe that’s just a product of the relative lengths, but I’ve no way to tell exactly.

I’m just thinking that if anything remains unlimited in length that will appear on the front page, then there will be too much scrolling for the front page to be really user friendly.

Also, would it be possible to add a “More->” link at the end of things that get cut off (like the review) so that people would know that there was more to read?  It would be even better if this link could point to a #tag in the article that is right where the material from the front page leaves off rather than the article page top (so that you don’t have to hunt through what you’ve read to find what you haven’t).  The header link should still point to the article page top of course.

It’s based on content length (and is something the author can decide on).  Basically, if something is more than say 5 paragraphs, it should probably be split.  If it’s just a few, then splitting it becomes a burden on the reader.

There is a Continue Reading link on the longer posts, but it’s too subtle.  We are going to move it to be exactly at the end of the post as well.

The link to the rest of the articles is much more obvious now.

Much more obvious, but it still links to the top of the article, rather than where the front page stuff leaves off.  Is there a way to make that happen?

There is.  I’ll work on that tonight.

The whole post length thing has to deal with the authors. We’ll be sitting down and training folks soon. Basically they have two fields. An introduction and a “rest of the story” field. Introduction is all that appears on the homepage. The post page includes the introduction & the rest of the story. Its up to the author as to where they will split that content, if at all.