Sort order
Posted on June 26, 2003 @ 10:53 in Blogosphere
One of the core definitions of a weblog is that entries are posted in reverse chronological order. However, when you have a monthly archive, doesn't it make sense to have the entries show up there in chronological order? For some reason lost in history, most everyone publishes their monthly archives in reverse chronological order. I've changed my monthly archives to show the posts in chronological order. The reason is that, if the reader wants to see a month's worth of posts, they're probably going to read or skim through them, and since some posts are follow-ups, it makes sense to preserve what little narrative or historical order there is.
In related Sitestuff news: because I have both individual and monthly archives, I've set the Robots meta tag so that search engines will not index the monthly archives, as per Virulent Memes' instructions. The monthly archives are there primarily for the reader's convenience and don't contain any extra information over and above the individual archives. And, as per Anders' instructions, I've set the Description meta tag of the individual archives to contain an excerpt of that post, hopefully making the life of search engine users easier.
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Some weblogs are not in reverse chronological order. It makes for interesting reading that way, but it's not the tried-and-true...
Trackback from Rodent Regatta on November 18, 2003 @ 18:28
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Comments and trackbacks have been closed on this site. My apologies.
Since MT-Blacklist inexplicably stopped working I had no other recourse than close comments and trackbacks to stop the spam. I've been meaning to correct this for quite a while, but life got in the way... in a good way I should add.