[dba-Tech] Question about web-site (tools?) with "continued.." links

[Arthur Fuller]

I do do much web-site stuff except so far mostly the back-end, so forgive
me my ignorance of front-end techniques. Suppose I have a front page with
headlines + first-paragraph of say four articles -- each of which has a
"continued" or "more" link at the bottom of the lead-in text.

How is this done? Does one do it manually, seeing how much text fits on
Page One, then finding or creating a new page-segment for the remainder?
Are there tools and/or templates that create a bunch of frames on several
pages and let you stream the text from, say, Page One, Frame One to Page
Three, Frame Two, to Page Five, Frame 1?

I'm kind of baffled how this works, because at layout/revision time who
knows how much text would be appropriate? Or, in the case of Ars Technica,
they populate Page One with the headline and a one-sentence summary that
doubles as the link to the next page. In the case of nybooks.com, they use
a photo and a title and the first paragraph, and then a <more> link.Rolling
Stone seems to use a combination of both -- on the left are direct links
and in the middle a photo, a paragraph and the whole thing functions as a
link.

I find it hard to believe that these sites employ people to cut and paste
this all manually. There must be tools that let you flow a large chunk of
text into one frame, automatically insert a "more" link, and invite you to
select another frame on another page to continue the flow, and repeat until
done. That doesn't seem like rocket science to me, so I'm guessing there
are tools to accomplish this.

Scaling this notion up, how do newspapers like NY Times and Washington Post
accomplish these tasks? I can't believe a hundred minions in India and
China do it; the turnaround time plus the time-zone difference would make
that approach impossible. So how do they do it? And how many people does it
take to lay out The Sunday Times?

-- 
Arthur