j's scratchpad

Steven Cohen focuses on the order things get posted to wikis and blogs in his thoughts on the differences between blogs and wikis. He thinks being able to organize materials in a way other than chronologically, the standard method of organization on blogs, is a definite strength of a wiki over a blog. Not being able to arrange things in various orders is indeed a weakness of most blogging platforms.

But what about blogging platforms where people aren’t stuck with posts in chronological order? Frassle, for example, allows people to rearrange the order of posts. It’s not easy to do and it’s not the best solution. By editing a post and opting to change the date and time stamp, the post goes to the top of the page. By using the Publisher, someone can put specific posts in specific places. If there are posts someone wants in a particular place, it’s possible to arrange that. It works well if it’s a post someone wants in place for a long time. It doesn’t work so well if it’s a post that’s going to change frequently because then someone has to manually change the arrangement.

Using a platform that allows categories helps a little bit, but posts are still arranged chronologically on the category pages.

When I blog, I often queue posts, like I’m doing now, then think about what I want on or near the top or what items I want close to each other before posting any of them. That helps a lot, but it’s not absolute. Maybe there’s something I posted yesterday that I want on top or next to something I’m posting today. There’s no way in this platform to make those changes without manually swapping posts by copying and replacing the text. Doing that breaks permalinks and causes a number of problems.

I also have to keep in mind that in some places, my feed arrives in the reverse order.

I think blogging platforms of the future will allow for the easy arranging of posts by some order other than time and date. As more users ask developers to implement that kind of feature, they’ll realize its importance and desirability.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 13th, 2004 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.