In a newspaper, the front page is prime real estate, and being in the top half, above the line they fold the paper over on is the reserved for the most important headlines. Some people buy the paper for the sports section, the gossip column, business news, et cetera. But no matter what a person's niche is, they'll see the top of the front page; even people just walking by the news stand will see this. That's where "above the fold" comes from.

Blogs are able to put a blurb on the front page, and the rest of the post on its own url, with a little read more link. And we can decide where to cut that blurb off. So ... how do you decide? Sometimes it's natural and there's nothing to decide, but other times you might weigh things like duplicate content, rss scrapers, the reader's attention span, what else is on your blog's home page ... when in doubt, how do you go about making that decision?

Since I write about top ten lists on my blog, I usually give a summary of what the user can expect to read about, like an opening preview to the rest of the blog entry. This way, visitors don't have to open up my post URL to read something that they weren't looking for.

However, I don't have posts on my homepage, it's static, basically a welcome screen giving them instructions and what they can do with my site. I also edit the static page with news updates with just one line or so, rather than trying to code it myself, and rather than creating an entire new post. I guess it basically just comes down to personal preference.

when i used wordpress i always tried to make the initial paragraph (what i used for the blurb) sum up the post entirely. Then the "read more" link would go into detail.

It sounds like people really like short introductions. I try to put my best foot forward, or really the image that a post is written around. And I'm not sure why I feel compelled to leave a paragraph or two showing.

I've had bad luck trying to show two Google maps on the same page, so I mate it a point to put that after the break.

Steven gave me some good advice on rss scrapers; I try to put a link back to my site in the opening paragraphs so that when my stuff is taken, I get some credit for it. Of course not all scrapers leave it in...

Ah the mythical fold - yes it exists in the real world because newspaper sizes are fixed dimensions. However, on the web you can never know what resolution the users screen is at, or how big their browser window is. With that in mind a good rule of thumb is to put your important stuff as near to the top of the page as you can so users don't have to scroll far to see it.

I don't have this option in blogger but there is a hack for it. I'm curious if people use the read more to ward off scrapers or to be able to add more items to the main page.

The read more link makes sense if the majority of your content is coming directly to your site/blog. To me it gets a little old when I come across it on search results and have followed the link to the site because I indeed wanted to "read more."

What blue-dreamer said. You can't know what resolution a person will be using when viewing your site so you can't really have an absolute above the fold.

Forrest what you can do is view your site at several different screen resolutions. I think there's at least one developer toolbar for every browser that will let you quickly view a page at different resolutions. I use the web developer toolbar for Firefox, but I know there's something similar for IE and I assume other browsers as well.

Look at your site at a variety of resolutions and see what is and isn't visible 'above the fold.' You won't get everything you want in at 800x600 and maybe not even at 1024x768, but you'll at least see what someone else will see and decide if it's enough or if you want to tweak your design a little.

Originally Posted by vangogh

What blue-dreamer said. You can't know what resolution a person will be using when viewing your site so you can't really have an absolute above the fold.

Yeah, I'm familiar with all of this ... actually I meant above the fold to mean the part of a blog post that shows up on the main page, but I can see where the confusion comes from. What I'm really asking is how people go about deciding where to put the <!-----more-----> break?

Oh. Completely different question.

Usually I just place it after the first paragraph, but sometimes I'll place it after the second one if it seems right. Maybe the second paragraph is much more connected to the first one than the third or maybe one of them or both are very short.

There's no real rhyme or reason to it for me. 95% of the posts after the most recent will get the 'more' tag after the first paragraph and a few will get a second paragraph included. I don't think I've ever gone beyond that.