I've found that the number of fields on a weblog post form is inversely proportional to how often I post. Given that, I've been searching for ways of getting rid of any fields that fall outside of the realm of absolutely necessary. One such field is the Summary field.
Moveable Type was the first weblog I know of that provided separate fields for a post's Summary, Content, and Excerpt. They intentionally left the meaning of these fields vague because they were really just separate slots in the database and you could use them anyway you pleased. You just needed to incorporate your definition into your template.
I thought this was a good idea initially but now I've come to dread the summary field. The truth is I'm never really sure what to put in there:
Should I excerpt something from the post? If so, how much? Maybe I'll just throw a two sentence description in there or whatever. Maybe I don't need a summary for this post since it's only a paragraph long.. Damn, then my index pages will look weird. Maybe I just won't post this because I can't figure out what I should put in this God-forsaken-summary-field. Wait.. which weblog is this? How are we using summaries? Maybe I'm suppose to use the excerpt field instead...
Alright, this is already enough auxilary thinking for a week's worth of posts. We need this to stop. I decided to forsake a bit of control over what gets put in a summary and let the code figure it out. I've allowed for four levels of detail on index pages:
- Full
- The entire content of the post is extracted and displayed on the index page.
- Excerpt
- Extract an excerpt from the full content. The excerpt is determined by first looking for a <excerpt> tag and if that's not found, grabbing the first paragraph of the entry. This seems like it hits a nice 80/20 for me. I usually just want to pull out the first paragraph as an excerpt.
- Brief
- The first sentence of the excerpt is extracted from the content of the post.
- None
- Nothing at all is extracted from the content of the post.