Digging In the Dashboard, Part II: Features for Longform Posts

As we discussed in the first installment of Digging in the Dashboard, WordPress.com has so many great features that it’s tough to be familiar with them all. I’m still discovering new ones myself! Let’s keep the discovery going with three more features that might be new to you.

This time, we’ll cover three features that can help you break up and organize longer posts, so that they display more cleanly and are easier for your readers to digest. Many of you might be ratcheting up your word count in anticipation of NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) and NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), so we hope these tips come in handy!

Pagination

Longform posts are all the rage these days. We want content, and more of it! But sometimes long, uninterrupted blocks of text can overwhelm your readers. If you sometimes have posts that run on for paragraphs, consider paginating them, to limit the amount of text shown on each screen (example here).

To paginate a post, all you need to do is insert the following tag in the Text editor wherever you want a page break to appear:

<!--nextpage-->

Your post will be divided into multiple pages, with page navigation appearing at the bottom or top like so:

The pagination will appear at the bottom or top of the post on your blog’s homepage, and also on the individual post page.

Page Jumps

Another way to help your readers navigate long posts is to add some headings and provide links to each heading at the top of the post. You can do this with Page Jumps.

For example, say you wrote a post for your users with instructions for how to use, oh, I don’t know, page jumps. Here’s how you might go about it:

Step 1: Break up your text with headings.

Step 2: Create links to those headings at the top of your post.

Step 3: Add a unique identifier for each link.

Step 4: Add an anchor where each link should “jump.”

Step 1:  First, you’ll want to add headings to each section of text. You can do that by bolding or underlining a section of text, or by using one of the preformatted heading texts in the Styles dropdown menu of the Visual Editor. For my example, I’ve bolded the Step X bit of each of my steps.

Step 2: Create links to those headings at the top of your post. This gives your readers something to click on to skip to the section of your post they’re most interested in. I’ve provided italicized links above to each of the steps in this set of instructions.

Step 3: For each of the links you’re providing at the top, you’ll need to a “unique identifier” similar to the following in the Text editor:

<a href="https://wordpress.com/blog/2013/09/27/splitting-content/?like_comment=183952&_wpnonce=6f733953e5#step1">Step 1: Break up your text with headings.</a>

I’ve used #step1, #step2, etc. as my unique identifiers for the above steps, but you can use any identifiers you like, as long as each is different. The text included where “Step 1” is above should be the specific text that you want to be clickable.

Step 4: Still in your Text editor, add an “anchor” similar to the following for each heading:

<a id="step1">Step 1</a>

The bit in quotations should match the unique identifier you created for each link.

Now that I’ve done that, if you click on my Step 1 link at the top of this section, you’ll be jumped to the associated Step 1 heading, and so on.

This set of instructions is a specific example of one way page jumps can be useful, but you can also use them to create footnotes, to link readers back to the top of your page, and even to link readers to a specific point on another page or post. To see what Page Jumps look like in the wild, check out this Learn.WordPress.com page.

The More Tag

Finally, you might have noticed that some themes here at WordPress.com don’t show the entire post on the homepage. They show an excerpt with some sort of “Read More” link to the full post. If you like this style, but you don’t have a theme that does this, you can still divide your posts this way using the More tag (we use the More tag on The Daily Post).

Wherever you’d like the excerpt to stop, add the following in the Text editor:

<!--more-->

Or put your cursor where you’d like the break to be in the Visual editor and click the “Insert More Tag” button:

Where the tag is inserted, a link will appear on your homepage:

The text “Continue reading” is used by default, but you can customize it by modifying the tag:

<!--more Read on!-->

Next time you have a lengthy post, try one of these tricks for splitting your content! Your readers will thank you.

You might also enjoy these related posts:

• Digging in the Dashboard: Three Features to Discover
• Publish, Promote, Repeat: Dashboard Tools to Share Your Stuff with the World
• Longform Layout: Keep Readers Hooked ’til the End

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