Excerpts and Technorati feed

[zoli]

I have these settings:
Display excerpts in summary view
x Use excerpt in trackbacks
x Use excerpt in email notification

So basically I do want to use excerpts, but display the full article on the Main blog page. What I noticed though, is that Technorati now only display the article title under thechnorati relavent tags. Previously, when I had the "display excerpts" turned on, I used to get the experts on Technorati, too.

Is this a change in what Technorati picks up, or is it due to my setting?
Other feeds are OK, e.g. I checked my own blog in Bloglines, and have the excerpt properly.

Thanks,
Zoli

[john]

If you are not using excerpts on your blog's categories, I would have assumed that Technorati would simply create its own summary by excerpting your article... Why it is not, I can't really say...

[zoli]

Well, the excerpt variable is populated, I am using excerpts as such, just would prefer to have a full display on the main blog page, that's why I turned the dislay excerpt field off. I have no clue if technorati takes the value of the excerpt variable or just looks at the article itself?

I guess a somewhat clumsy workaround would be to turn the "display excerpt" on, but give excerpts a longer word limit, say 200 or more? But that creates larger RSS feeds ....

Z.

[john]

I have no clue if technorati takes the value of the excerpt variable or just looks at the article itself?

Honestly, I do not possess that clue either. Technorati is unusual in that they index both HTML and RSS and Atom, all of them if you have them. PubSub for example only looks at your RSS or Atom feeds, not at your HTML web page. They have said that they look at all of these items for their service; it's not clear what the recipe is for creating their search results.

Just to clarify one thing, this checkbox:

Specify the maximum length for automatically-generated excerpts.

in the Advanced Settings page is only for automatically-generated excerpts created for you at posting time. Those excerpts will not be modified after the fact if you modify the value of the Excerpt size.

And quite honestly, we don't recommend you using the automatically-generated excerpts when you are using the Rich Text Editor, as it can cause the problems described in this thread; someone in fact just yesterday was having the same problem.

It's much better to create your excerpts manually to avoid this problem.