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eftychia at 04:24pm on 2005-04-04Attitudes toward <lj-cut> vary widely, from both reader and author perspectives. All the more so when it comes to cutting specifically for length (as opposed to large/multiple images, layout that may break friends-page views, "most people won't be interested" footnotes/tangents, and spoilers). I'm not really interested in re-opening that debate, as there are very good reasons for most of those points of view, and many of the differences come down to differing priorities, differing user-interface preferences, differing amounts of patience and/or connection speed, etc. No, the point of this entry is news rather than persuasion...
Until recently all you could do if you were a person who really
wishes people would cut-tag long posts (for whatever your personal
"long" threshold is), and had friended someone like myself,
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theferrett, or maugorn, who can get
longwinded and seldom or never use cuts, was to 1) defriend us, or
2) make a special "unconcisefolks" friends-filter and takes us off
your default view, or 3) just grit your teeth and accept that we had
reasons other than subtle-hint-obliviousness for not using cuts.
But now, if you're an LJ member using the S2 style system,
there's another answer. You can make your friends-page automagically
cut long posts for you even if the authors won't, and the people
who dislike cut-tags can go on reading the full versions
of our entries without having to click through to
<voice="paul harvey">"the rest of the
story"</voice>. You can thank learnedax,
who figured it out and posted the relevant code:
I've been fiddling a bit with making my friends view block quizlets, which involves a bunch of string parsing that the LJ style language does not already include, and laurion commented that it would be handy to chop entries over a certain length. I realized that I could do that by adding two lines to the basic layout, so now my friends page auto-cuts after 1000 characters. (That number is actually rather smaller than I want for regular use, but works well for demonstration purposes.)You can see examples of this code in action on the Ax's friends-page.
I won't be using this on my own friends-page, at least not the default view (if anyone cares, I can write about my own preferences WRT cuts again), but if there's a way to make it only affect specific friends-filters, I could see it coming in handy for my "I'm too busy to read more than a small handful of my friends right now" filter.
(blueeowyn, I haven't read the S2 docs yet ...
I wonder whether a similar approach could be used to automagically
convert normal HREFs into the "open in a new window" ones you
prefer. Or, come to think of it, to undo that feature
for me ...)
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IMHO, you should always cut.
If someone doesnt want to see the cuts, they can always go the console and disable them via:
set opt_ljcut_disable_lastn 1
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b) It's been experimentally determined that a lot of people usually don't bother to click through, so if you actually care whether anyone reads the next paragraph, a cut is counterproductive.
That said, I appreciate the folks who cut quiz memes, large images, formatting that forces horizontal scrolling on small monitors, details that they know only a small fraction of their readership is interested in and that they don't consider important to their message, spoilers, entire reprinted articles, and really lengthy chunks of fiction. Now if there were a console setting that would leave those cuts in place but disable all the others, I could maybe be convinced to grant you that point.
At least this way the folks who do want cuts-for-length can get them without everyone else having to turn off cuts-for-other-reasons to avoid them.
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b) Yes it has, but I'd wager that even more people don't make it to the end of long un-cut posts. I know I'm more likely to click through than read a long un-cut one. If it's long, I don't often have the patience to sit through it. If it's short and reasonably interesting, I will.
The answer is to write your cut posts with enough of a "teaser" before the cut.
I'd love to see a feature like this wind up in LJ proper with a mod=
You declare an over-under cut theshold. Say your over-under is 20/50.
This means that Uncut posts over 20 lines get a cut generated for them.
Cut posts get some slack though. 50 lines of uncut text will be displayed before it is generated.
This way you'll get a better sense of what the authors intend, rather than get everything cut at 20 and have to get an RSI to read your friends list.
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i still think people who get all worked up about cut tags or the lack thereof need to get a goddamn life. one with some real problems in it. hey, i have some they could come over and solve for me, if they've got so much free time.
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"Could"? Probably -- the S2 language is pretty powerful. But it would require doing at least a simple parse of the entry's content, so it would take some hacking, and you'd have to be careful that it runs fast enough. (LJ only allows so long for a page to be processed -- if it takes too long, it gives up and returns an error.)