Thursday, December 02, 2004

007: Blog chronology...

One thing that weirds me out about blogs is the fact that you usually encounter the newest entry at the very top of the pile... Does this seem odd to anyone else? Think about it this way, and I've already noticed this type of thing occuring in this very blog, you can be reading along and encounter a sequence of entries that reads like this:

25th: Here is that web address that I meant to type a few days ago - http://xxx

23rd: My story was finally published in an online journal. As soon as I get the address I'll post it as a link to the site!

18th: An online journal is thinking about publishing one of my short stories!!! It about a little bird that...

I'm assuming you get the point. The chronology is all messed up by the fact that the most recent entries are at the top where most people start reading and the old info, which may be completely redundant by the time you get to it, goes at the bottom. I suppose a more elegant blogger than myself might actually go back and modify the old posts so that they are no longer wasted pixels, but I can't imagine someone with a huge blog being bothered to take the time to read through all their old posts and fix the problematic info...

The question that this brings to mind is: Do people actually read the old posts on a blog? I suppose, if you are particularly enamored with the writing style that a person has you might want to read the other bits that they've written, but I doubt, in our drive-thru, instamatic, 60 seconds or less society that very many people bother really digging into a blog, especially if it's written by someone they don't really know. I can't say that I have bothered to read in depth on anyone's blog, accept for Neil Gaiman's when I was working on a project about him for a class...

I wonder if there is some way to reverse the order of the entries on a blog so that the oldest entries come first. In my case, I try to have some kind of continuity to my writing, occasionally referencing something that I've already written, but if the person reading my blog when one of these references comes up hasn't read the earlier bit, they aren't going to get the joke. (Most of my references are jokes, by the way.)

Subconsciously I must have already been bothered by these things when I started writing this blog otherwise I wouldn't have numbered them. If you just see a title sitting there, you might think that it's a stand alone "article" or something. (These are what I write for Vision? Nary! by the way, stand alones) But here, I want people to START AT THE BEGINNING. These entries are a continuing adventure, a serialized story, an electronic comic book (without the pictures because I don't know how to drop pictures into my entries yet... and I can't draw for shit... not that that stops me from drawing, it's just a warning for when I do figure out how to add pictures...) So, if this is the first entry of mine you've read, I forgive you, but do scroll down to EPISODE ONE and read from there, please. I'm not George Lucas. I think the first episode should come BEFORE the fourth...

Now I need to go to bed and see if my wife is asleep yet, then jump all over the bed if she is and see if she screams! Fun...

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