A plee to the bloggers amongst us.
 

Now I've finally invested in a wifi router I've discovered my new favourite bedtime reading, travel blogs. But I have a plee to the writers.

If you've set up a blog specially for your travels, and you're now at home with your feet up and not using it anymore, do you think you could change the display settings so that it reads with oldest post at the top to newest at the bottom.

I know, while you were writing it it made more sense the other way, so that regular readers could see what you'd done since they last read you, but you're home now and not posting, and my scrolling finger is suffering from RSI at having to go up and down, to get it in the the right chronological order.

Good Call Alex,
I spend half my time reading travel blogs and agree, this would be good to see :thumbup1:

Wot? like mine BikerBytes.com:thumbup1:

Most blog systems do not have a timeline setting. I think...
Its quite a lot of work to do it my way, but hey... as "they" say...

Great suggestion Alex, and I've been trying to it with my own blog. Can anyone tell me how to achieve this on blogger.com, because I've been struggling with it for the last week or so. I'm having particular trouble with changing the sequence of blog entries that were created on the same day.

Garry from Oz.

A simple solution if you can update your entries is to add at the bottom a link that points to the next leg.

On the homepage of your blog, keep a bookmark to the first entry.

In Blogger you need to turn on the archive. Go to the bit they call your Dashboard, then click the Settings tab, then click Archiving. Choose when you want it to archive, daily, weekly, whatever.

Then you should get a little bit somewhere on your blog (on the hugely out of date one of mine it's bottom left). You can see you'll get a "tree" and that's dated newest to oldest.

How do I change the order of my archive links? - Blogger Help

Tells you how to turn it round.

Yeah, it's harder to do than it seems. I'm no internet guy, so I had this argument with my web designer. In the end, he at least put up a "Jump to page" feature at the bottom of my Updates page. That way, at least, you could take a stab at guessing the page number where you left off... not the best system, but cheaper than having him redesign everything.

Also, on my homepage, I've included a link to my last trip... which goes to the first entry so you can click through in order. Again, not great, but at least I'm trying!

If the blog you're reading is powered by Wordpress, you can add "&order=ASC" to the URL.

EG:
normal Mongol Bikers.com » 2007 » August
story Mongol Bikers.com » 2007 » August

That IS good! How does that work when you're still adding content and so forth? For instance, though my trip is over, life goes on and I do add material every week or so.

Also, my web-guy does all that sort of thing for me and he's extremely lazy/unreliable (mostly because I don't pay him very well).

At any rate, I may just leave well enough alone because I'm probably redoing the whole site soon. Wordpress is great for getting a site up for cheap, but my next one needs to be a little more adaptable.

A blog usually doesn't exist as a fixed website. It exists as data that is stored and only glued together when a user goes to a website address. So if you ask to view the website using the &ASC trick, the site simply gets glued together for you in a different way. It's still the same data underneath. And this gluing only applies to your session, not other people using the site at the same time or afterwards.

So as life goes on, authors add posts and the site shows them in whatever order the site is set up to use. But the canny viewer can change this just for their viewing, using such tricks.

Make sense?

Wordpress etc allows tagging too. So you might tag certain posts as 'ontheroad' and others as 'backhome', and allow your users to see just the ones about the trip, or any other tag you set up. EG on my site if you want to know about MSVA tests you can just view that tag. But my site is pretty unloved otherwise!

A couple of comments here, hopefully useful.

I had the same issue when I started to read some blogs, it is an annoying thing to have to scroll down then up, then down etc.

This is the nature of a blog, if you read it every day, you get to read it inline and it makes sense. Not so good coming in later.

That was why I chose not to post using HU blog, because I wanted to control the looks. I also wanted to post larger pictures than HU allows.

I chose Wordpress. It is free, but I paid $10 to get my own domain name mapped to it without the word WORDPRESS in the web address.

I studied the way the software works and decided I could do what is needed.

The result it, if I have 5 days of travel experiences to post, I can post 5 different posts AND change the date that it is posted on. This means although the latest post shows up when loaded, because I have a calander which shows posting dates, readers can easily jump to whatever page/date/month they want.

It takes no extra time to do it this way, a simple click on an edit button and I think the result speaks for it self.

For an example, this is a page from my recent around Oz leg.
2008 October « TravellingStrom

You can select any day that is blue and it is a different day, but it does not mean I posted on that day.

It just means you have to be organised with photos, write the text as you go then upload and post when you get internet access, which was limited for me on the first half of the trip.

That said, I recently did a ride here in Oz with no internet until I got back home, so I posted all in one day and just seperated each day on the one page. This is from the Aussie Horizons Unlimited meeting last weekend.

With the Wordpress site, you can edit in normal, or HTML, the latter is the easiest imho.

Cheers
TravellingStrom

Very useful thread. Thanks everyone.

Any advance on Wordpress ?

My blog is in wordpress..

http://www.touringted.com/&order=asc/ as was suggested makes no difference to the layout.

I would also like to change the date order.

What do you want to change? You are using Wordpress, it is easy.

Login, go to Post, Edit and select the one you want to edit, then on the top right in Publish, you can edit the date of publish, this will make the days seem in order.

You still need a start date though for people to start from, maybe on your home page? Then every day after that, if it is in chronological order, will show up at the bottom of the page with previous or next entries, so you can step forward or back.

I hope that helps

Cheers
TS

The solution for Wordpress is easy, but you need to host your own blog or at least be able to install plugins.

This is an example of how it could look: Asien ‘06 - Alle Artikel | buebo.de (Page is in German but the idea should translate).

First of all you need to have all the post you want to list in one category. I just make a new category for one specific journey. For example my first journey was to Southeast-Asia in 2006 so it's called "Asia '06".

You should only have the Articles in the Category that you want to have listed later. Of course you can asign articles to more than one category and tag them further without any problems.

Next step is to install this plugin: List category posts Wordpress Plugin (English) | Picando Código

Finally just create a new page and follow the instructions to list all the posts in a specific category. In my case it pretty much looks like this:

[catlist id=77 orderby=date order=asc numberposts=-1]

'id' should be the ID of the category that you asigned your travel posts to. If you don't know the numerical value, just have a look at the categories page, click on the category you want to use and look into the adressbar in your browser. At the End you will see something like action=edit&cat_ID=77 where cat_ID= is the ID you're looking for.

Once all of that is sorted out, the output of the plugin is pretty easy to customize. What you get is essentially a basic html list that could be styled with css if needed.
As for me, the basic output is just fine. :D