A new method for showing blog content in chronological order.
Update: I am sorry to say that this method no longer works because of the demise of Yahoo Pipes, a web service that allowed bloggers to sort their blog feed.
It was, briefly, the state of the art, in a mad-scientist sort of way.
There are still several other valid, if unintuitive, ways to show blog content in chronological order.
This hack was my first venture into messing around with Blogger's plumbing. It was Rube Goldberg, it was spit-and-chickenwire; it was in every way too clever by half, and now it has suffered the final fate of all things clever in that way.
I will indulge my sentimentality by not deleting the many posts I sweated over back in 2010, but they are useless to you. If you want to reorder your blog posts, check out one of the remaining methods.
Blogging is classically about the Latest Thing, featuring the most recent post first. Scroll down to read everything backwards.
For bloggers, however, blogging is also a journey, and some would like to be able to show their content that way, in chronological order.
The standard method for doing this is to edit the post date, which controls the order that posts appear, giving all posts fictitious dates to achieve the desired order. This does the job but might be unsatisfying for a number of reasons.
I've worked up an alternative method that might appeal to some bloggers.
Update: There are now a number of ways to do this and mine is not necessarily the best. Read this post for a comparison of
leading blog-journey hacks
In a nutshell my workaround entails the following steps:
- publishing your blog as a feed;
- using Yahoo Pipes to re-order the feed and introduce some formatting elements, then publishing that as a second feed;
- using a service like feed2js.org to convert the feed to javascript
- Pasting the javascript code on a static blog page (that part is easy)
- Adding some custom CSS to your blog's template to format the elements of the feed as they are rendered on the static page.
This solution entails multiple steps and may include some unfamiliar methods, but if you are game I have done most of the work for you and will guide you every step of the way. No knowledge of javascript is required; it's all done for you.
For an example of what is possible using this method, see (a) the
"journey" page of this blog (unformatted) or (b)
of my "real" blog (formatted).
You might also prefer
just a list of your blog posts in order, which is simpler still.
Further explanation in subsequent posts.
Update: As of 2012, there is another method for flipping blog-post order that is very promising. Interested bloggers should
check it out.
I am just a blogger, not some uber-hacker, and would like to thank the Yahoo Pipes help forum and also
Vin, a technically astute blogger who generously gives advice on
Blogger's help forum from time to time. Vin first told me about Yahoo Pipes (for a much simpler application) a few years ago.
Final note: This was a lot of work, and
I hope Blogger will continue to allow bloggers to post javascript code into our blogs.
On the other hand, I am sure that Blogger could implement a blog-journey option that would knock the socks off this hack in terms of flexibility and ease of use, and I would not resent it
at all if they did so.
Next: Getting your feed