We are improving blog post summaries in Micro.blog. A summary of a post is a sentence or two that can describe a longer post, or an excerpt of the post, to help the reader before they click to read your full blog post. Summaries are usually only displayed in the Micro.blog timeline when there is a title for the blog post.
Timeline posts look like this, with the summary below the title and link:
To set a summary, there is a new text field on the web when editing posts. You can type in this field or click “Generate” to have AI generate a summary for you, which you can then edit:
Note that this button is hidden if you have disabled AI in Micro.blog.
Summaries work with Hugo’s .Summary variable. When you set a summary for a blog post, Micro.blog includes two new fields in the front matter:
summary: "Your summary text here.",
custom_summary: true
This extra custom_summary field is so that themes and plug-ins can determine if a summary was created by you or if it was automatically set by Hugo. For example, the default Micro.blog JSON Feed for your blog will only include summary in the feed if it was a custom summary.
If you use a blog hosted elsewhere, to take advantage of summaries you will need to use JSON Feed. You can add an external feed on the Sources page to bring your posts into the timeline.
In the future, summaries will be used in more places including cross-posting to other services.