Stats Not Displaying Newer Posts, In "Posts" Lists

The problem of last week, with Stats, was fixed late yesterday, and our Stats displays once again are showing Posts pageview counts and enumerating individual Posts. Now, we have a perceived problem, being reported by newer blog owners.

My Stats display does not show my newer posts!

This concern is visually valid - but it's not real. It's most common with blogs that have just over 10 posts, which are owned by people who are not aware of the Stats display limitations, as we have explored.

The Stats Posts displays enumerate the 10 most popular posts, for any given time period. Newer posts will seldom appear in the Posts lists, for many blogs.

• The "Posts" lists enumerate individual posts, and shows pageview counts for posts viewed in single post view. Newer posts will be displayed in their entirety on the main page, and read as main page views.
• The lists show only the 10 most popular posts. Newer posts, not yet indexed by the search engines, or linked by your readers, won't have as many inlinks - and the post page URLs won't get as much traffic from other blogs and websites.

Owners of newer blogs will not be aware of these details - and with just over 10 posts, may not see the significance, in their Stats displays. These owners will simply see, from time to time, posts that don't appear in the lists.

If you look at the main page, for this blog, you'll see use of "Jump Break" in my newer posts. Each of these posts, to be read in their entirety, can only be read using the "Read more" link - and from the individual post page. Look at the address window above.

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2011/10/stats-not-displaying-newer-posts-in.html

Since you're viewing these words, this post is being counted in Posts, as a pageview. Thus the Posts lists, for this blog, will enumerate this post, sooner.

Here, we see another benefit of using "Jump Break" over other auto summarisation techniques. The "Jump Break" links directly to the single post view of each post - and it uses HTML, which makes it search engine friendly. Some previous auto summarisation techniques used JavaScript to hide the full post content, preventing search engines from indexing the full post text.

Besides encouraging the post content to be read as a post page, the search engines will index post content in the post pages. The archive retrievals, and main page, will only list the partial content of each post - and search engine hit lists will contain more relevant content.

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Auto Pagination And Read More Solutions

Possibly the hottest issue this week, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken, is the Auto Pagination feature, which was introduced last week. Auto Pagination automatically helps people to limit the sizes of their archive / label / main pages, as downloaded from Blogger servers.

Before the Blogger post editor "Jump Break" solution was provided, there were at least 3 known variants, for auto summarising posts. One was provided in Blogger Help: How can I create expandable post summaries?; and at least 2 others were provided as third party suggestions. It's possible that any of these 3 variants are present in some blogs, where the owner has not seen fit to remove them, in favour of deploying the "Jump Break" in new post editor.

Cloud Strife, in Blogger Help Forum: Problem Rollup: Auto Pagination for blogs with Layouts templates suggests an obvious solution - replacing use of all early "Read More" variants, with the new post editor "Jump Break".

The problem as I explained earlier is that with the older solution, the blog post still had all the content sent to the viewers' browser while just making the post look smaller by not showing all the content. This will solve the aesthetics problem but not the slow-ness problem. The perceived slowness differs much more to the person who has cached everything in the browser (mostly us who view our own blog) than those who view it first time or rarely.

The new feature which is as simple as adding an extra <!-- more --> in the HTML or rather simply using the new editor, keeps the look and feel as good and makes your website much faster to load. Which I am sure your readers will appreciate. And once the site loads faster for your viewers they are more likely to visit the pages you have there.

I'll add the advice that adding the "Jump Break" option to your posts will have to be done on a post by post basis, but the individual post update is fairly simple to do. And, taking the advice from Cloud Strife

with the older solution, the blog post still had all the content sent to the viewers' browser while just making the post look smaller by not showing all the content

it appears that not all "Read More" solutions actually reduce page size when loading.

The bottom line - if you replace the old "Read More" with the new "Jump Break", your readers will see a significantly faster main page download. Or, if you wish, you will be able to load more (abbreviated) posts total, and stay within Auto Pagination induced page sizes.

As Blogger continues to resolve the problems associated with Auto Pagination, its not a certainty that all 3 earlier used variants of "Read More" will continue to operate. If your blog uses an out of date "Read More" variant, and you're unable to replace it with the recommended "Jump Break", you might want to watch the display of your blog carefully, during the next week or so.

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You Might As Well Jump!

by Sean McCullough, Software Engineer, Blogger

It's time to announce another Blogger Birthday feature! Many users have been asking for an easy way to implement "Read more" links on their blog's index page. In fact, for years bloggers have been implementing "Read more" jump breaks themselves by manually editing their HTML --- a process that was complicated and error prone.

Today we are excited to announce our latest birthday present: Jump Breaks.

With Jump Breaks you can show just a snippet of your post on your blog's index page. Blogger will insert a "Read more" link to the full post page where your readers can keep reading.

There are a couple of ways to insert a "Read more" jump to your posts. If you use the new post editor (available on Blogger in Draft, or by enabling it via the Settings tab), you'll notice the "Insert jump break" icon in the editor's toolbar. Click this icon and the "jump break" will be inserted into your blog post at your cursor's position.

If you don't use the new post editor, you can still insert a jump break in Edit HTML mode by adding <!-- more --> where you want to position the jump break.

Want to change the "Read more" text to something more your style? No problem. You can edit the "Read more" text by clicking Layout and then Edit the Blog Posts widget.

One more note, the Jump Break feature does not change how your post appears in your feed. You can configure post feed options by going to Settings | Basic | Site Feed, and editing Allow Blog Feeds.

Update: Users that have customized their Blog Posts widget or otherwise have highly customized templates: You may need to edit your HTML to enable Jump Breaks. First, back up your template, then follow the instructions at the bottom of this help article.

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!