Dynamically inserting text (extended articles)

Perhaps using iframe?

[ThatAdamGuy]

Hi there,

I'm using the blogging software called Movable Type (highly recommended by the way -- movabletype.org), and one of the features of this system is that articles can be posted in two parts: an initial excerpt followed by a javascript "Read more -->" button, the pressing of which results in the remainder of the posting being unhidden from view.

The advantage of this system is that many more articles can fit on the same page, to be 'expanded' at will by users. The disadvantage, though, is that the entire text of all articles is loaded with the page, resulting in some dang huge page-loads :-(

So what I'd love to do is figure out a way to have the initial view remain the same (just excerpts of the articles showing up at first), but instead of simply hiding the second part of articles using javascript, have this stuff loaded by a mouse click right below the initial entry when people click "Read more -->".

Any ideas?

[edited by: tedster at 7:16 am (utc) on Jan. 14, 2003]

[DrDoc]

Yep, I'd say using an iframe is the best solution.

[ThatAdamGuy]

One of the challenges of iframes, however, as I understand it is that the minimalist file being included (in this case, parts of a blog entry) could be picked up and separately indexed by search engines... creating a major ickiness if people searched and were brought to such an incomplete 'page'.

For the time being, I've instead figured out how to paginate my blog, thankfully reducing bandwidth and manual-page-breaking concerns.

[DrDoc]

Well, there are two ways to avoid that:

1) Edit your robots.txt file to prevent indexing of the particular directory

2) Add the <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NONE" /> tag

[tedster]

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. Are you concerned about people coming to the iframe document from a search engine, but orphaned from its parent page? You can use a script to check for that situation and force the doc into its parent page, inside the iframe.

It's the same principle as regular frames (see message 21 on Generic Javascript [webmasterworld.com])