STARTING YOUR BLOG RIGHT - WordPress in Depth - page 34

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Here are suggestions for key Reading Settings:
• Front Page Displays —You can choose to display your latest
posts, as with most blogs, or a static page. You should only
change this, in our humble opinion, if you're completely con-
verting your blog to a standard website, and have done the
hard work to make it a good standard website. (This is hard to
accomplish in WordPress.com; you might need to move to
WordPress.org to pull it off.) If you change to a static front
page prematurely, you might end up with the worst of both
worlds: a boring blog because the front page doesn't change
much, embedded in a badly designed website!
• Blog Pages Show at Most —This setting has to be used in
conjunction with showing the full text of a post or just the
summary. If you're showing full posts, and the posts are on
the long side (as with gvDaily.com, for one example), then 10
posts—the default—is probably too much. The average person
can remember 4-7 things in short-term memory and tends to
get bored with lists longer than this, so consider limiting your-
self to 7 full posts on the front page. If you use summaries,
you might want to include more, as the list will be easily
scanned; perhaps 10-14 entries is a good number.

tip
A reader-friendly approach to the
front page of your blog is to
have your front page host the
full most recent article and sum-
maries for previous articles.
Then readers can see what's on
your mind at the moment and
also scan previous postings for
anything else interesting they
might have missed. The easiest
way to make this happen is to
use the More tag in all posts but
the current one. When you write
a new post, leave it More free,
but insert a More tag in the post
that was previously newest. Your
readers are likely to love this
approach.

You can show summaries by inserting a WordPress tag in your posts called More that makes the
user click for more. A button that inserts the More tag is available in the Edit Post page, dis-
cussed in the next chapter.
• Syndication Feeds Show the Most Recent —A syndication feed is a file that WordPress automat-
ically makes available to web services, called feed readers , that bring the content of sites into a
uniform format and publish it. Most feeds are based on RSS, Really Simple Syndication, which
has many versions; for more on syndication, see Chapter 9, “Adding Graphics to Your Posts.”

This setting must be set in conjunction with the next one, as you might be concerned with the
length of your feed. The default setting is 10 posts; other settings you might want to consider
are including the same number of articles as on your home page, or including one post, so feed
recipients always get just your most current article.
• For Each Article in a Feed, Show —Most bloggers choose to show full texts because we can't
imagine that anyone would want to miss any of our sterling words. However, people who want
more visitors to their blog follow the old dictum, “Why buy a cow when you can get the milk for
free?” (That is, why visit your blog, when an RSS feed delivers complete postings for free?) Most
people think that only putting summaries in a feed is annoying, so you should only do it if you
have a lot of added value—for you or visitors—on your site. Because most WordPress.com blogs
are noncommercial, the assumption is that you'll include full posts in your feed, as you're not los-
ing anything financial by doing so. (And really interested readers might visit your blog anyway,
to see what else you have to say.)