Too Clever By Half

Update: Please view "Automated lists by topic," a more-recent post, for clearer instructions about how to build lists of posts that grow as you publish new posts.

Edits I've made in response to changing technology have rendered the below report more difficult to follow.

Online stuff changes from time to time, and for this topic my revisions have proved awkward.

Read more about archived posts, if you like.

If you use labels to characterize your posts (and you should, it is a very handy way to organize your blog), you probably know how each label groups those posts together by category on separate label-search pages.

But wait, there's more.

You can list all of the posts with the same label in your sidebar, sorted alphabetically if you like, or in chronological order, oldest first.

For instance: All your recipes. Your 2010 trip to Italy. Your beer reviews. Whatever.

Update: Parts of this report are obsolete. Parts still work, but not with the latest blog themes from Google. It's complicated.

Online stuff changes from time to time, and for this topic a revision would be impractical.

Read more about archived posts, if you like.

Where Blogger fears to tread, however, clever hackers (one of them too clever by half) have rushed in with template modifications and other tricks.

As of this writing there are four different hacks to show your blog's content first to last instead of last to first, each method with its own advantages and disadvantages. Here's a quick survey.

If you are an early adopter you may already have switched your blog to one of the shiny new dynamic templates.

But maybe you are cautious (like me), your face pressed wistfully against the glass, eyeing the sleek futuristic designs but aware of some drawbacks (and uncertain of others).

Sigh no more! You can link directly to dynamic views of your blog without changing your template.

You can show your blog content in its original posting order, oldest first.

There are several approaches you can take, none perfect, as described here.

One way bypasses one set of problems by using third-party web services. Another bypasses problems with web-services by using Blogger's own architecture.

Which is best for your blog? Consider which is likeliest to hold up over time.

Two years ago I introduced a method for showing your blog's content in the order you wrote it, oldest first.

For the past few months I have been testing a promising new way to do the same thing.

When it works it is very good. Here is how it looks on this blog. It took me less than five minutes to install.

If you want to show your blog content oldest-first, I recommend trying this one out before resorting to the method I created. How's that for an endorsement?

No method for reordering blog content is perfect, however. Here are some pros and cons.

The folks at Blogger, bless their hearts, erect several obstacles to creative use of your blog's feed.

Some of us use our feeds—our whole feeds, not just the most recent stuff—to make an index of our blogs, or to reverse the order so that it begins with the oldest post.

The default Blogger feeds, however, show only the most recent 25 posts.

This is pretty easy to get around: you just append "max-results=999" to the feed url, which overrides the 25-post limit (replacing it with a a larger one). So the feed for this blog, breaking the 25-post barrier, is

http://too-clever-by-half.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?max-results=999

It turns out that Blogger has a second, more-serious limit of 500 150 posts per feed. Here's how that works, and how to work around it if your blog has more than 500 150 posts.

Update: This report is largely obsolete. Online stuff changes from time to time, and for this topic a revision would be impractical.

Read more about archived posts, if you like.

The quirky but useful Pipes web service has added a new kink, with implications for bloggers that use it to reverse the order of their posts.

Running your blog feed though the pipe I built will flip the order, and until recently you could then just port the pipe's feed to feed2js to show your blog in the order you want.

Frustratingly, Yahoo Pipes has started to paginate its feeds in blocks of 100 posts. So the feed url you get from Pipes only displays the first 100 posts in the series. To see the next 100 posts, you have to add the following to the feed url:

&page=2

You then run both feed urls, separately, through feed2js, and mash the results together so they look like a continuous feed.