Character length in Reader summary?
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I’m curious as to how the Reader is coded to determine where to cut-off a post for purposes of the “intro” found on the Reader. Is there a maximum character count? If so, are the characters in the post title part of this count? What about if there is a subtitle – do these count as well? I’m crafting a post with specific important information in the first few sentences that is important to have appear in the intro and can’t find an answer. Thanks for any help!
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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I make sure my first 2 sentences contain “the hook”. Previously 55 words appeared of my posts appeared but lately I think that has been reduced. I have no idea what the answers to your questions are and I will be subscribing to this thread which I will tag for a Staff response. Please subscribe to the thread so you are notified when they respond and please be patient while waiting.
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The information from your blog’s feed is used in the WordPress.com Reader. You can control your WordPress.com blog’s feed settings via some options contained within Settings -> Reading. The ‘For each article in a feed, show’ option allows you to display a ‘Full Text’ or ‘Summary’. The summary limit is 55 words, only the post content is counted.
Please let us know if you need any further assistance!
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Thanks, Kardotim. I affirmatively chose the summary option for a number of reasons. Perhaps that’s the only way to have control, but I don’t ever recall seeing a full post anywhere on the Reader (that could become a bit overwhelming for long posts). As for the summary option, I guess the operative word is “limit,” not that the reader will automatically post the first 55 words. I say that because far fewer than 55 words are posted on mobile devices. And, oftentimes, far fewer than 55 words show up on the reader on my desktop. I’m wondering if the “limit” is impacted by the size or orientation of a featured image or gallery, or even by having a blank line between a heading and a sentence or between two sentences. Sorry to be a dog with a bone on this, but I would really like to understand the parameters; it’s helpful to know how to best structure a post so that information that I deem important for click-throughs will actually appear in the reader summary. Thanks in advance for any additional information you can provide.
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I’ve just contacted our developers to help you answer your questions. We’ll contact you as soon as possible.
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Currently the web Reader limits the summary to 200 characters or 25 words, with some adjustment to avoid breaking words or sentences. The iOS Reader uses a similar limit, whereas the Android Reader simply limits the summary to four lines.
The title doesn’t count towards this, nor does a featured image impact the cutoff.
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