"read more" for longer exceprts on homepage…

Hi Alex,

first of all thanks again for a brilliant theme!

I’m fiddling around with following issue since a few days now and decided to open a a topic here since I’m stuck I think… I’m trying to add a read more link to the excerpts on the homepage and already consulted with following support articles:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/read-more-46
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/add-read-more-to-bottom-of-post-preview

It would be working pretty straightforward with your suggestion in the second post. However, now the “read more” link would appear at the end of every excerpt. The thing is, I do have some very short posts (quotes and stuff) on the site so it would be confusing to have the “read more” link at the end of these short excerpts too, right!?

Here’s my site: http://www.coffeestainedjournal.com/

I already amended the /* Excerpt ending function in the child theme in order to get the output […]. Now, I would like an “read on…” link to appear just after this at the end of the excerpts for the articles that include the […], see!?

I already tried something like this:

/*  Excerpt ending
/* ------------------------------------ */
if ( ! function_exists( 'alx_excerpt_more' ) ) {

	function alx_excerpt_more( $more ) {
		return ' [...] <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>">read on...</a>';
	}

}

This only results in adding sort of a thumbnail and link to the next article on the hompage minimized after the […].

Is there any chance to achieve what I have in mind? So basically adding a read more link to that function??

Thanks in advance and apologize if the “issue” got a bit longer…

Kind regards,
Oliver