Recently, I was reading someone else’s blog and I wanted to track how they had made their own Van Der Spek planner, this person had a few posts about it but they were not consecutive posts, but done over a number of weeks and months. Blogs are designed to be like diary entries with the most recent post first and they read backwards, but what if you want to start at the beginning of a series of blog posts and read forward?
There is an option to tag blogs with a series of descriptive links, but often, like my own blog, these are done when the blog is written and then when I go to write another post on it, I sometimes go back and match up the original tags, but I don’t think I have ever gone back and gone this was the start of that idea, let’s add a new tag to reflect that. With this persons blog there were just so many tags, that I found it a little overwhelming and confusing to pick the tags I wanted to track that particular story. Whilst my blog was still relatively new, tags are not a problem – but if my blog gets as old as the other blog, will it become as problematic for a reader?
As a historian, I am quite aware that sometimes people store their documents in a particular fashion, often that is done for a reason, but it may not be a reason that is logical to anyone other than the person who created it and may not be all that useful for the person trying to access it. Having thought about it I decided to create a new page for my blog. It will organise my Filofax blog posts by topic and then have the blogs added chronologically to that topic. This way over time if I have running themes in my blog, a reader can go to this page and see the blogs very easily and be able to read posts they want to read, without having to spend ages navigating my blog.
So on the menu at the top of my blog, if you hover over the link ‘Filofax’, there will be a hover menu appear with the option to click Filofax posts by topic. You can also access it by clicking here.
I hope this is a more useful way for readers to navigate my blog. If you have any comments on suggestions on how to improve this, please leave them below.
