While I won’t be swapping my post order around, Monday’s discussion on weblog post order has resulted in one small change here on Eclecticism.

Until now, I’ve had my monthly archive pages displayed in “newest to oldest” format to match the main page. This made sense at the time, but after spending a little time scrolling through and searching for specific posts, I’ve swapped the monthly archive pages around to display chronologically, with the beginning of the month at the top of the page. Far easier to browse through now, I think.

That’ll be the extent of the changes I’m making here, but in Eric’s followup post “First Order Solutions”, he proposes a possible solution that would allow for a chronological first page that would use cookies to collapse already-viewed posts to just the headline, leaving new posts expanded to be easily read. It sounds worth experimenting with, though I’m still not entirely sold.

First off, it could create a lot of unnecessary clicking if someone was searching through the page for a recently posted bit of information (expand one post, look through, close it, expand the next…or expand them all and scroll, scroll, scroll). It reminded me of something that Shelley quoted in her response to Eric’s post, from one of her posts in 2002:

A weblogger’s nightmare:

I am looking at a weblog page with a Google box to the right and a NY Times box to the left and several buttons with coffee mugs all over them that generate OPML, RSS, and various other assorted and sundry XML flavors. Within the page there is this outline with links and plus signs and you click on the plus signs and the content is expanded to show even more outlines, which can expand to even more outlines, and on and on and on. And I see myself hunting desperately through the page knowing if I look hard enough, deep enough, I will find the truth. I will find what the weblogger has to say. Finally, after I click enough of the little plus signs, and get rid of all these boxes that keep opening up and tell Google to shut the fuck up for just one second, I find it.

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p>Also, just how much information will the front page hold under Eric’s scheme, and for how long will it stay? I see two possible options: either the page just keeps gathering new posts for the month (and eventually any visitor would have to scroll down through a page or two of collapsed headlines to find the recent posts), or as Chris Vincent points out, there would be the visual oddity of having older posts drop off the top of the page as new posts are added to the bottom.

Some interesting ideas, I’m just not entirely sold yet as to their practicality.

I was flattered, though, to get a compliment from Eric in his post, though…

…Michael wrote an entire post in chronoillogical format, with the paragraphs running last to first. The interesting part is that it made almost as much sense that way as forward, which is either a testament to Michael’s writing skills or else an indication that I’m wrong about the nature of writing. (Hey, why not give my critics more ammo?)

iTunes: “Where I’m From (Aural G. Ride Novox)” by Digable Planets from the album Where I’m From (1992, 4:50).

[See also: Which way do you want to go? Up? Or down? | MovableType 2.0 | No more combined feeds | NaNoWriMo | More archive tweaks ]

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