Are there inverted blog themes?

  • jfistere · Member ·

    I wrote a blog with an entry for every day of a 28 day trip, and soon I will finish adding pictures to it. While it appears that a few people have been following it real time, from now on it will be read as history. When reading it from earlier to later posts, the read has to back up after each day over what was just read to find the next post. What is needed is a blog with the latest post at the bottom, that opens by default to the top of the latest post. Then you can go to any date, and read posts in their natural order without backing up. Is such a format, or option available?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • jfistere · Member ·

    …the reader…

  • raincoaster · Member ·

    That’s not a theme issue. That’s a date issue. Follow these instructions:

    Write a Book

  • jfistere · Member ·

    The link seemed to describe a way of posting a book with a chapter index. I didn’t see much about dates there. What your comment seemed to indicate that I could change the date of my postings and get them to appear in reverse order. Was that what you meant?

  • thesacredpath · Member ·

    The only way to reorder the posts to appear in the order you want them (as opposed to the standard reverse chronological order of a blog) is by changing the dates on each post so that they appear in the order you want them to.

    This can cause issues though if the posts have already been published and the search engines have indexed them since the published date is part of the URL. That means that changing the dates will create 404 file not found errors from the search engines, and they do not like that and may very well dump your blog from their indexes.

    The link Raincoaster provided is one way to list links to your posts in the order that you want them without having to change the published dates.

  • jfistere · Member ·

    Thanks. I am really surprised and disappointed that there is no way to do it. Neither listing links in order or manipulating publish dates is a good solution to allowing the reader to read blog posts continuously, as I am sure you realize. Have you seen discussions of this feature previously?

  • raincoaster · Member ·

    Many. Dozens. But given the several million bloggers here who have not requested it, staff seems content to offer those workarounds to the relative few who have asked.

    The convention on blogs is newest post on top. If you use a theme like Vigilance with an Alert box, you can use it to post a link to your first post, and then it’s easy to click Next Post, etc etc and read through in order that way.

  • panaghiotisadam · Member ·

    @rain: I’ve seen this discussion many times, but I haven’t seen your clever suggestion before!

    Two notes:
    a) Doesn’t have to be the Alert box: can also be a page or a text widget.
    b) Has to be a theme with previous/next tabs on single posts (many themes, including Vigilance, come with no such tabs). See list here:

    Previous/next navigation links (2)

  • raincoaster · Member ·

    Ah, thanks. I thought staff had corrected that. They promised they would.

  • The topic ‘Are there inverted blog themes?’ is closed to new replies.