Shortening the main page

Since the time when I revived the blog, I always have had the feeling that the main page is a bit too long.

At first, I tried to shorten it by displaying less number of posts (from showing all posts within the past 7 days, down to just 5 most recent posts). This improves things quite a bit, but I still feel guilty of bombarding my readers with a really long page. Because, from my view, the 5 recent posts still make me tire of scrolling sometimes.

So, if even I feel annoyed by its length, some (if not all) of you will probably feel the same way too. And that's not a good sign.

The solution I use here is to create post summary. This way, the blog won't tire readers' eyes, and not too much scrolling will be done when they want to read older posts down the page.

At the moment, if you access this blog via the main page (i.e., http://b0nyb0y.blogspot.com), you will see that 5 most recent posts don't make you scroll too much anymore. Now you can just read the first paragraph of each post, and click “more...” to read the rest of it.

From how it appears, it's all fine and dandy. But if you take a look at the HTML source, you'll see that this is a half-baked solution at best. Though the page looks short, in reality your browser still loaded 5 entire posts; the CSS rule just hides most of the text away from you. So, though this change might improve readibility to us people, it doesn't make the page load any faster than before. In fact, the bandwidth of yours (and mine) is just wasted whenever this first page is loaded. :-(

Unfortunately, it appears that there is no other way, since this is the limitation on the Blogger part. Unless they decide to integrate the real “post summary” feature in the next version, I guess I'll have to stick with this approach.