How to short the individual article on the home page

[Hoa]

I have sumbit lots of articles to my blog,  problem is the first article is too long  and it takes most space of the homepage.  It is difficult to have a overview of my blog for the visitors. But i have seen some other's website, there is a " read more" mark show at the starting of each article, how to edit it?

 

Any one can help me here? Thanks

[Rustywolf]

you could either cut it off at x amount of letters (for instance, 100) using this:

substr($text, 0, 100)

or you could split it at each enter (to get the first paragraph)

explode($text, '\n\n')\

i recommend the first