I know my Agility readers will give me a hard time about this non-Agility post, but hey I'm "thinking about technology" too. I was limiting to five the number of articles/posts on my main and index pages to minimize the download time for non cable/DSL visitors. But I've noticed some searches hit my site for which an article was moved off my main page and I'm sure they didn't hunt around for the missing post. So I wanted to show more articles without increasing the download time.

The Blosxom plugin seemore automatically adds a link labeled "See More..." in place of a special label in each article. Selecting the link takes you to the full text of the article. This useful plugin was developed by Todd Larason, a blogger who's developed a number of powerful Blosxom plugins.

I made a minor modification to seemore, which I've forwarded to Todd, to allow showing the entire article for a configurable number of articles on a page. This lets you see the full text and diagrams for the latest articles and only seeing the first couple paragraphs of the older articles.

If you are a Blosxom blogger and would like my modifications you can download my modified version here. Unzip it and put it in your plugin directory. By default it should work the same as Todd's original version. A new configuration variable $show_all_of_stories_until can be set to the number of stories on each index page that you'd like to show in full.

So I've modified most of my posts to include the seemore label and increased the number of articles shown on each index page to $blosxom::num_entries. I like this new site configuration; let me know if you do too.

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