Answer to splitting blog postings

I promised to blog my answer to splitting blog postings earlier. As you can see I have found out how to - I have reedited my first two (longish) postings using this technique and hopefully they show up in the new form.

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How did I do it?

The following help posting on Blogger solved the problem:
http://oeb1.blogspot.com/2007/05/expandable-post-summaries-short-post.html

I followed the instructions to the word and after a bit of tinkering it worked. But I learnt a few things along the way so here are a few extra tips I picked up:

• I used WordPad to edit the template as instructed. I used the search function (ctrl-f) to find the exact strings needed.
  
• You really do have to use some label for each posting or it does not work.
• If you compose your post and then cut and paste it in (as I did for the re-edit) then it is really only possible in "Edit Html" mode. You essentially paste the summary text over the word "Summary" in the template and the body of the post over "More" making sure that all the other Html commands are not overwritten or moved so that they don't work properly.
• Unless you want "more..." to show up as the end of a short post then you do need to add the "~short" label to the post. That brings up the "-end-of-post-" message at the end of the post instead of "more...".
• Just in case the web page is taken down I printed out the instructions in pdf format for safekeeping.
• Sometimes, for no apparent reason, I have found that this does not work properly and the formatting does not look right in the "Summary" part of the post; also, sometimes the "more..." tag has gone missing. After a good deal of trial and error I found that using the "Compose" editor sometimes introduced extra and statements into the post. This confused the issue and I found that searching through the text and removing all of these except the right at the end solved the problem and did not introduce any other problems.
  

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