blogging crew

I have previously written about how useful the Wordpress “read more” teaser is. It enables the reader to “scan” the first few lines of the article and then make the decision to read the rest of it or not.

WordPress makes it easy to break up long posts so you can save space on your home page. Simply insert the ‘more’ tag while editing a post, and WordPress will display the text that comes before it as a “teaser” followed by a link to the rest of the post.

By default, when a reader follows the link, the single-post page is loaded and the browser “jumps” to the next piece of text. This jump can be disorienting, and some bloggers prefer to link their teasers to the full post instead of the anchor. I certainly prefer to do this.

Unfortunately, the only way to avoid this “jump” is to hack the WordPress source code. Even if you’re comfortable with hacking your source files, you’ll have to remember to do it every time you upgrade your WordPress installation and that’s a real pain.

Thankfully, I recently came across a brilliant plugin called StripTease which makes this task a sinch. It does all the code hacking for you!

The StripTease plugin is a simple filter that changes WordPress’s default teaser links so that they link to full posts.

Installation is a doddle:

1. Download and unzip striptease.zip file. You can get it here.

2. Put the striptease.php plugin file in your WordPress plugin directory.

3. Activate the StripTease plugin on your WordPress plugins management panel.

The StripTease plugin doesn’t require any configuration. Once it’s activated, it will immediately begin stripping the “more” fragments from your teaser links and anyone clicking on your “read more” teaser will see the entire post.

This plugin gets a glowing endorsement from me!