OK, at the posting Tutorial it says
It only appears in your post if you have changed the index.php template file to display the Excerpt instead of the full Content of a post.
and
For more information, see Excerpt.
If I go to the link suggested it says
An excerpt is a condensed description of your blog post and refers to the summary entered in the Excerpt field of the Write Post SubPanel (see Advanced Editing). The excerpt is used to describe your post in RSS feeds and is typically used in displaying search results. The excerpt is sometimes used in displaying the Archives and Category views of your posts. The Template Tag the_excerpt() can be used to access the contents of this field.
An excerpt should not be confused with the teaser which refers to the first 55 words of the post’s content. When typing a long post you can insert the <!–more–> Quicktag after a few sentences to act as a cut-off point. When the post is displayed, the teaser, followed by a hyperlink (such as Read the rest of this entry…), are displayed. Your visitor can then click on that link to see the full version of your post. The Template Tag the_content() can be used to display the teaser.
Related articles: Customizing the Read More.
But nowhere does it tell me how to edit the Index file as desribed in the first part??
At http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/the_excerpt
it says
Displays the excerpt of the current post with […] at the end, which is not a “read more” link. If you do not provide an explicit excerpt to a post (in the post editor’s optional excerpt field), it will display a teaser which refers to the first 55 words of the post’s content. Also in the latter case, HTML tags and graphics are stripped from the excerpt’s content. This tag must be within The Loop.
If the current post is an attachment, such as in the attachment.php and image.php template loops, then the attachment caption is displayed. Captions do not include the excerpt […] marks.
But does not say in which file you have to enter this
Must one change the coding on one of you pages or is there a function in the control panel you can switch on or off?
OK, Don’t worry, I’ve got it.
If there is somebody else who battles to do this, have a look I wrote a short “How To” article at
http://pietpetoors.com/blog/how-to-add-excerpts-in-wordpress/
Excellent! Thank you for posting that “how to”. Nice and simple!
Thanks for this – a little solution that saved lots of time. Most kind of you to post the instructions.