Making the homepage more attractive and simple

Uptill now we have a responsive design which has little to no design CSS added to it.
This time we are going to add a little bit to the design. We are going to make post summary and post images to appear on the homepage as or like featured content.
In short we are going to make post thumbnails, and summary for our home page.
To do this I took help from this post.

To do this we use a Javascript that uses the first image in a post and creates an excerpt which then is shown.

To do this search for

<data:post.body/>

There are only 2 occurrences of this in our theme. Replace the 2nd occurrence with 

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != &quot;static_page&quot;'>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != &quot;item&quot;'>
<div expr:id='&quot;summary&quot; + data:post.id'><data:post.body/></div>
<script type='text/javascript'>createSummaryAndThumb(&quot;summary<data:post.id/>&quot;,&quot;<data:post.url/>&quot;,&quot;<data:post.title/>&quot;);</script>
 <span class='readmore' style='float:right;'><a expr:href='data:post.url'>Read More &#187;</a></span></b:if></b:if>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'><data:post.body/></b:if>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;static_page&quot;'><data:post.body/></b:if>



For this to work, we need to define following javascript code as well.

Go to the HEAD section of the template and past following code just before </HEAD>

<script type='text/javascript'>
posts_no_thumb_sum = 490;
posts_thumb_sum = 400;
img_thumb_height = 160;
img_thumb_width = 180;
</script>
<script type='text/javascript'>
//<![CDATA[
function removeHtmlTag(strx,chop){
if(strx.indexOf("<")!=-1)
{
var s = strx.split("<");
for(var i=0;i<s.length;i++){
if(s[i].indexOf(">")!=-1){
s[i] = s[i].substring(s[i].indexOf(">")+1,s[i].length);
}
}
strx = s.join("");
}
chop = (chop < strx.length-1) ? chop : strx.length-2;
while(strx.charAt(chop-1)!=' ' && strx.indexOf(' ',chop)!=-1) chop++;
strx = strx.substring(0,chop-1);
return strx+'...';
}
function createSummaryAndThumb(pID, pURL, pTITLE){
var div = document.getElementById(pID);
var imgtag = "";
var img = div.getElementsByTagName("img");
var summ = posts_no_thumb_sum;
if(img.length>=1) {
imgtag = '<span class="posts-thumb" style="float:left; margin-right: 10px;"><a href="'+ pURL +'" title="'+ pTITLE+'"><img src="'+img[0].src+'" width="'+img_thumb_width+'px" height="'+img_thumb_height+'px" /></a></span>';
summ = posts_thumb_sum;
}

var summary = imgtag + '<div>' + removeHtmlTag(div.innerHTML,summ) + '</div>';
div.innerHTML = summary;
}
//]]>
</script>

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != &quot;static_page&quot;'>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != &quot;item&quot;'>
<style type='text/css'>
.post-footer {display: none;}
.post {margin-bottom: 10px; border-bottom: 1px dotted #E6E6E6; padding-bottom: 20px;}
 .readmore a {text-decoration: none; }
</style>
</b:if>
</b:if>


That's all.
You can also download the theme I have made with all the changes below.


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