I’m a person who likes things clean and simple. Excerpts do that most of the time. I use them on this site. It’s just a sampling of the post that leads to the main post. Most blogging tools have an option to do excerpts. In “Textpattern](http://textpattern.com it’s a box at the bottom of the post where you insert excerpt text. “Wordpress](http://wordpress.com has the same thing, but also can make excerpts by truncating posts to (I think) the first 200 words or so.

I was working on a design for a “blogger](http://blogger.com user last night and thought since she is a writer and obviously will write a lot, I thought excerpts would be great for her. The problem is, blogger doesn’t have that capability built in. I’m not real handy with Javascript or other plugin methods of doing things like this, so I used CSS. Hey, it’s what I know. It might be a pain for some, but here’s how to do it. If you use blogger, would like excerpts and don’t mind an extra step, here it is…

First, put the CSS in place…

In the stylesheet area where your styles are at the top of the page… insert this:

.more {
display: none;
}

The “MainPage” tags specify the remainder of the post to only be hidden on the main page so that it will all appear on the item page when that page is viewed. You could also say if you want to see excerpts on the archive page as well.

Now, each time you post…

In your post where you want to “break” the text and not show any more on the front page, enter this code:

<div class="more"> Then, keep writing, and when you finish, insert this: </div>

This part might seem like a pain to do each time you want an excerpt, but a little extra work sometimes really improves your blogging. And if you still need the free blogger, this gives you some flexibility without paying for a hosted blog to run Wordpress or Textpattern.

Wait, there’s a better way!

Another tip for making posting easier… use post templates!

• Go to SETTINGS –> FORMATTING
• Scroll to the bottom and you’ll see a box for a POST TEMPLATE
• Copy and paste the following in there…

Excerpt
<div class="more">
The rest of the post
</div>

• Save these settings and republish. Now this text will already be there each time you post. If you don’t want an excerpt, just type over it. Ahh… now isn’t that easier?