WordPress offers the has_excerpt() method to determine if you create a separate excerpt on a post, but does not seem to have a built in function to ask if it uses the special comment <!--more--> for an excerpt coming from the beginning of the post content.
posts posts
Just one day after writing that I would try to post once a day, I missed posting. Certainly contributing to my difficulties in posting is the amount of time I spend thinking about and composing posts. Sometimes when I have a topic that I could easily write a short post about, I have a desire to hold off until I can write a more in-depth version. But really, I’d prefer to write more and get my ideas and experiences out sooner, even if the results are imperfect and more open to criticism. I can always revisit later. If I don’t write when it’s on my mind, there’s a chance it just will never get written. I have tons of blog post ideas or partial drafts written down that are old enough now that I don’t remember enough about them anymore to easily write about them.
Also contributing to my difficulties is the never-ending stream of new blog posts and other information other people are creating for me to read. I tend to get sucked into reading them, ignoring getting my own things done. A while back, I wrote on my whiteboard “Less reading, more writing”. I haven’t been following that advice, but that’s part of my goal with this post-per-day idea. We’ll see how I do.
I am going to try to post something once a day for a while, either on this blog or my personal blog, even if it is just a short, tweet-sized post. I think posting helps me document what I’m working on, techniques, things I find, etc. for my future self to more easily find. It’s surprisingly easy to forget things when I figure them out for one project, then don’t use that same thing again for a little while. My site will eventually have something more advanced for these purposes, but for now simple blog postings will work.
Also, I’ve noticed a strange SEO / traffic benefit to my site wherein my traffic is much more likely to be on the higher side on the day or day after I post, even though those posts are almost never the ones being visited. Perhaps the search-engine algorithms see the site as more “fresh”, even though the articles that get the bump aren’t fresh at all.
The biggest problem with this is that even a post I intend to be quick often takes an inordinately long time as I look up things and add more to it. Like this post. We’ll see how well I do with my goal.