Summarizing Posts on a Landing Page

I have looked at some ways of trying to change my blog to make it more user-friendly. One suggestion made by friend Mariano suggested that I add the function of summarizing my blog posts on the main page and giving the reader the option of reading further. The idea is to make the blogs load faster and make it more easier to use.

Mariano suggested a method where each post is summarized in the HTML using small changes in the blog's template and in the post itself. This method is great because it give you so much control over what the post looks like when the blog loads. The problem is that in order to take advantage all older posts will have to be augmented but every new post will have the structure in place and I am too lazy to add the HTML to the older posts because I have blogs containing more than 500 posts. Here is the code on how to make it happen from Mariano himself and you can visit Mariano's blog, Atheism is Dead, to see it in action.



I have found another alternate method to do something similar. I like this method a little better because it automatically summarizes the posts and puts a thumbnail of the first image in the post in the summary. In order to pull it off, you just need to follow the steps in the following website: Automatic Post Summaries for Blogger with Thumbnails. You have control over how many words are in the summary as well as quite a few other things.