Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Attitudes 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, 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.)

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 ...)