I was surprised to not find anything related to this topic. The “x min read” that appears at the bottom of post previews in the Casper theme is a neat feature. It’s based on the post word count, amongst other things.
But I’ve been using the HTML card to add a Jupyter Notebook to my post. This looks really nice when viewed on the website, because I hit a couple of issues:
- The rendering in the editor is a mess, and takes a long time. I think this is excusable, since the HTML produced by a Jupyter Notebook is reeeeeeeally long and complicated. My 2000 word Notebook produces a 650kB HTML file! So I was happy that it worked at all, but an option to simple disable/give up the editor rendering would be nice, since the preview and published versions look just fine, and it’s impossible to edit the HTML because the rendering is so bad.
- The word count that appears in the editor is grossly inflated, assumedly because it’s counting the HTML source, not the rendered words. Again, no big deal - it just means that particular feature is not useful if there’s a big HTML card, except…
- The grossly inflated word count produces a silly “x read time” on the post preview. Eg., my 2200 word post appears on my home page as a “281 min read”.
So my experience is related to my use of the HTML card, but zooming out, would it not be useful to exclude parts of posts from the post word count for reasons like this? Is that already possible?