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

[Peter Brawley]

On 6/28/2016 10:35, Arthur Fuller wrote:
> 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.

Depends on the frontend tool you're using. WordPress has a "more" tag 
(https://en.support.wordpress.com/more-tag/). jQuery has hide() and 
show() funcs that accomplish much the same thing. Or it can be done 
manually by showing the first N lines or paras and providing a "more" 
button to show the remainder when clicked.

PB


>
> 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?
>