Workaround – Blog Posts Page

[djpadavonaParticipant]

As many of you know who regularly blog, the way Symbiostock is built prevents it from properly displaying a Page of Posts. If you try to limit the number of posts to “6” or so on the front page, your number will be ignored and every post you ever wrote will be displayed.

This creates page speed/load issues, and also can cause confusion for Google because there are so many subjects.

I have a workaround. It’s a little clunky, and it won’t help you with your older posts, but at least it gets the posts page under control.

Posts In Page Plugin
http://www.ivycat.com/wordpress/wordpress-plugins/posts-in-page/

The first thing I did was download the Posts In Page Plugin, then Activated it. Second, I went into Appearance->Customize->Static Front Page, and altered the Posts page so that it wasn’t pointing to anything. Effectively I turned off the ability of WordPress to put posts on my posts page.

Finally I created a new blank Page. You will have to create a link to your blog/articles pointing to this page (obviously). You can put some design into it, but the main thing is to add a block of html code to it that the Posts In Page Plugin uses to force a certain amount of posts onto the page. As an example:

[ic_add_posts showposts=’6′]

This results in a brief synopsis of your 6 most recent posts showing on the page, with “Read More” links to each article.

It works without a hitch.

Issues –

* There aren’t links to prior posts, so you want to make sure that you have enough links pointing toward your older posts that Google won’t devalue them. I use an Archived Posts list by month on my page to keep my old posts linked. It isn’t glamorous, but it works.

* There isn’t any creative control over how your recent post synopses are displayed. It would be nice to have a small picture preview, or be able to dictate how much text is shown. There are probably other Plugins which will do the trick, but Posts In Page is by far the highest rated and it seems to be well liked and stable.

Good luck.

[JoAnnSnoverParticipant]

Thanks for posting about this plugin and workaround. I’m not sure if I haven’t noticed it because I don’t blog much or because I went for a custom blog table of contents page (which I have on my About menu)

http://www.digitalbristles.com/blog-posts/

This is done with Page Builder and Masonry by Site Origin. I have no idea if this is another way to create speed/load issues, but I thought I’d experiment with it

[Author]

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