Size Your Jump Breaks, Properly

The most important single part of any post is the first sentence, and the first paragraph. Jump break, the auto summarisation feature for Blogger blogs, helps you focus your readers attention on the first sentence / first paragraph of your posts, while offering each reader a personal choice - to read more of any individual post - or to scan the entire main page.

The casual reader decides, while reading the first paragraph, whether the post is likely to be interesting enough to read to the end.

The portion of the post before the jump break supplements the title of the post. By using a Jump Break, you enable the blog to display more posts on the main page, in a smaller space. With more posts loaded on the main page, the reader is more likely to see a post which interests him, and continue reading. With the smaller space, the blog loads faster, and the reader is more likely to read further.

It's a balancing act.

1. The smaller the "jump break", the smaller the individual posts when summarised, and the more posts you can fit onto the main page.
2. The larger the "jump break", the more of each individual post is visible to the reader, immediately.

You size the jump break as small as possible, while still indicating what the post is about. If the post is small overall, say 2 or 3 paragraphs, you might make the jump break text a single sentence. A larger post, say half a dozen paragraphs or more, might justify a full paragraph (2 - 3 sentences) jump break. And again, word the first sentence, and the first paragraph, as carefully as possible.

If you are like me, and never used Jump Break

I have a large blog, and hundreds of posts! I don't have time to edit each post, one at a time, and add a Jump Break!

This is an ideal blog improvement to install using a Progressive Publishing strategy.

1. Edit the existing posts that you have time to do, right now.
2. Create new posts, with Jump Breaks installed.
3. Edit more old posts, later.
4. Periodically review main page views of all posts updated, and look for problems. Please! Test, periodically, whenever you edit posts.

The more Jump Breaks that you install, the faster you'll be able to install more, on newer and on older posts. It's easier to do it, than to explain it.

You will note that, when you use a jump break, the individual post is displayed, with the text after the jump break, scrolled to the top of the screen. This, too, encourages you to keep your jump break text as short as possible, to avoid your readers losing key information as they start to read the full post.

If you want to see this feature in action, hit the "Home" button, in the menu bar, above. Like many blog owners, I'm learning how to use this feature - as well as why to properly use this feature in each post.