Chronological Blogging
Blog engines always display posts in reverse-chronological order. This is appropriate if the content stales quickly and readers are mostly interested in what the most recent thing is. But it’s often unhelpful if you want to use the blog engine to develop a static piece of content. In many such cases, the author wants the reader to consume the content in the order it was written. Examples of content that works better this way include:
- Stories or fiction
- Instructional content
- Reference material
For all of these, first-time visitors should be presented with the first post, which would include the most basic information on the subject or the beginning of the story.
I’ve frequently thought about using a blog engine to write a detailed how-to guide on one subject or another, but this problem has discouraged me. A plug-in could solve this, and likely there’s an answer since this problem has been identified for years. Here’s what I’d want the plug-in to do:
Remember how far through a blog each visitor has gotten. Enable some UI so that visitors indicate that they have read an article. Articles that have not been read are displayed oldest-first. By default this visitor state could be stored in a cookie, or server-side in an account.
Clearly this wouldn’t be helpful for a blog like engadget or techcrunch that posts dozens of articles every day. But these blogs need to help their readers than what I can describe in a few paragraphs today.
Leo is a professional geek who looks forward to the robots taking over. For more current, less coherent thoughts, follow him on twitter