Within a Community Server blog, there is a list of blog entries. Sometimes, it is not easy to know which entry a visitor viewed, because the visitor viewed the entry listed in the list of blog entries (ie, the post list), instead of viewing the individual blog entry.

I therefore investigated and researched into this issue, and found out that it is possible to replace the entire text of the blog entry in the post list with an excerpt instead.

In the post list, the body of a blog entry is retrieved like so:

<CSBlog:WeblogPostData Property="FormattedBody" runat="server" />

So, using my sleuthing techniques described earlier, I replaced the attribute Property's content with "excerpt" instead, like so:

<CSBlog:WeblogPostData Property="excerpt" runat="server" />

This causes the contents of the blog entry to be replaced with a smaller excerpt, hence, increasing the performance of the blog, because visitors now see a small excerpt, and if they want to read more, they'll click on the actual entry.

But wait! How do you create a link to the actual entry? It turns out that you can use the following tag:

<CSBlog:WeblogPostData Text="Read more..." LinkTo="post" runat="server" />

So, the replacement now reads:

<CSBlog:WeblogPostData Property="excerpt" runat="server" />
<br/><CSBlog:WeblogPostData Text="Read more..." LinkTo="post" runat="server" />

Thus, in the post list, a small excerpt, followed by "Read more..." is shown to the visitor, and the visitor can click on the link to read the entire article.