Want a Non-Chronological Collage Format for Blog
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Hello, I am interested in creating a blog which doesn’t use the traditional ‘chronological ordering of posts’ from top to bottom.
I want to have a more collage style blog (which will be very text heavy with some images) which updates fairly often. I was thinking something that resembled Windows’ “metro” interface could work all right, but I want to be able to also use the blog a bit more like a bulletin board – to be able to just pin up an image or text so that it shows up on the front page – sort of a “thought of the day” type thing.
I’m wondering if anyone knows of a good way to do this, and if a theme would be the main way I can achieve this type of functionality/look. I also like the idea of just previewing an article on the main page and then linking to the full thing (since the articles I write are long and technical text walls) on a different page.
Basically I want a collage landing home page that links out to all sorts of different pages.
**I’ve been told I could use a photography or news blog theme that has this type of design – I want to be able to display as much information on the ‘home page’ as possible, and have it be easily reordered non-chronologically to emphasize different topics as I change them.
Any help would be much appreciated.
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to be able to just pin up an image or text so that it shows up on the front page – sort of a “thought of the day” type thing.
You could use sticky posts for these.
Basically I want a collage landing home page that links out to all sorts of different pages.
One theme that comes to mind is Sketch, which has a front-page slider that allows you to link to a mix of pages, posts, and portfolio items.
The blog section of any theme will always display posts in reverse chronological order, as that’s the WordPress default.
You might want to try experimenting with the display posts shortcode, which which you can use to mix and match posts in many ways, in any theme.
One more idea is to use a theme that displays posts with an excerpt of each blog post on the homepage in a grid-type format – such as Visual – but to hide the dates with some custom CSS. You’d then use the dates only to put the posts into the order you’d like them to displayed in the dashboard, but they wouldn’t be visible to people except in the post’s URL in the browser.
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Thanks so much for your detailed help with links.
1. As I feared, this seems a bit more involved/complicated than I expected.
2. (I have to say I’m rather surprised that there *still* isn’t a way to really use a webpage like a piece of paper and just tack/paste/rearrange things WYSIWYG style, as I sort of expected to have come about at this point in time).
I assume that I could in principle (I don’t know CSS/HTML, and aren’t really interested in learning just to do this project) use Adobe Dreamweaver with WordPress to manipulate the homepage (where most of this semi-complex layout will be).
People seem to do that:
http://blogs.adobe.com/dreamweaver/2014/01/how-to-set-up-wordpress-in-dreamweaver.html#.VL3hwsajTOo
3. That said, I think something like that Visual Theme you’ve suggested, perhaps combined (though I have no idea how to do that, I’m sure it can be done) with a scrollable top window, which is quite common these days on websites, which like a gallery, can rotate through different pieces of content/static post-it type cards, etc. could work. I don’t know how easy it is to mix and match dynamic web elements like that without coding it by hand.
4. I suppose my fears by making the design too complex (assuming I can figure out how to, as you say, mix different posts), is that updating it and maintaining it will become burdensome itself.
5. This sort of leads into a completely different question (which I have asked previously and been told the answer is No), which involves using WordPress in conjunction with Facebook (or G+) which have very nice ‘link scrape’ features which automatically grab link photos and essentially format a blog post for you. I’ve been told WordPress does not have this functionality, which is very disappointing.
e.g.
https://wordpress.org/ideas/topic/auto-generate-facebook-style-link-preview-when-inserting-url-into-editorI’ve been told I can replicate it to some extent by posting first on a G+/FB account, and connecting it to WordPress, though I don’t know if that will carry over the formatting successfully. I often share links with comments, so this auto formatting feature is very important to me.
6. I know #5 may seem very unrelated, but I’m trying to figure out if I spend all the time formatting the WordPress page the way I want, but then subsequently cannot integrate the FB ‘link scrape/preview’, then it might not be worth it (for me).
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Well, as for 2) you are using blogging software. You are asking it not to behave like a blog.
You can indeed do what you want, but unless you intervene, by, say, editing the datestamp, posts on all platforms will go in either alphabetical order (rare) or in reverse chronological order. Because software must automatically put them in SOME kind of order. That’s it’s nature.
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5) that cannot be done on a WordPress.com blog at all. It could be done on a WordPress.org blog, but if you’re finding THIS level of tinkering intrusive, you probably will find that one too much work to set up.
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Hello – thanks for posting.
1A. It’s not so much the ‘order’ of the posts on a blog that I have a problem with, but rather the way I’m trying to organize content, some of which is updated frequently, and some of which I want discretely/statically posted (Perhaps simply using static pages with a bunch of links on the homepage is an easy solution to this). Furthermore, I’m trying to organize all of it on a homepage in such a way that’s its organized spatially/visually, rather than in some linear order.
Some of that I understand I can set up with different themes, as suggested above – and there are a few which might work.
2A. As for the dynamic content (and also ease of updating), I know that I can connect WordPress to post on Facebook via JetPack, but, as I tend to believe Facebook has ‘better’ (simpler but easier esp. viz link sharing), composition software, I’m interested in composing in Facebook, which I find much faster usually, and THEN having that post to my WordPress Page.
In essence, I think I want JetPack in reverse. JetPack seems to automatically repost a WordPress item into a designated Facebook page, whereas I want the opposite to occur. I don’t know if that’s possible, but seeing as it goes one way, I can’t see why it can’t go the other? Google Plus is also an option as they have a similarly easy-to-use link sharing/commentary type composition interface, which I much prefer for this.
3A. Perhaps ultimately (and I have agonized for months over how to do this), you have made a correct assertion in that I want to build a site which is half static content (mostly about my work, technical docs, manifesto, that type of thing), and half dynamic blog (which I wish I could just steal the Facebook or G+ software and insert it into my page in lieu of a blog).
4A. Perhaps WordPress simply won’t let me do the above easily, especially given I have some particular unique formats I want to enforce on the homepage (I don’t care so much about the children pages viz. formatting).
5A. Another suggestion given me was that Facebook apparently allows people to have ‘blog’ pages which are publicly exposable. Perhaps I can just link out from my static website to such a page if I created one? It’s hardly elegant in anyway, and requires the user to go to a different website.
I don’t use Twitter, but of course embedding Twitter on webpages is standard – I suppose I’m wondering why I can’t embed FB or G+ the same way.
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Yes, I understand you wish to compose elsewhere and have it automatically feed to your WP.com blog.
Blogs that do that get suspended here. You can’t do that. WordPress.COM is not an aggregator; you can use a WordPress.org blog on paid hosting to do it, although Google will penalize you for duplicating content.
3 Sure you can do that here. Just use a custom menu.
4 Nothing I am aware of will let you do all of what you want easily.
You can make Facebook embeds in a WordPress.com blog, but if that’s all the content of the blog it’s a) going to rank abysmally in search engines b) going to drive people to read you on FB and abandon the blog c) going to take forever, I mean FOREVER to load d) probably going to display blank boxes on the front page because only images which are in your media library can be featured images e) not display any of the content in your RSS feed, the tag pages, or the Reader or email subscriptions.
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Right… That all sounds quite negative…
1B. I’m not sure why, but people seem to regularly tell me that I’m not ‘using technology properly,’ which I always find humorous since in my experience the entire point of technology is to be used the way the user desires. So I’m not sure if that’s the case here between WordPress and myself.
2B. Clearly, WordPress is quite restrictive about what is posted and how on sites that run their webware.
3B. To clarify a few things – firstly, I frequently write original interest-type pieces of 1500-3000 words and often as a reaction to, or at least related to, a link or links on the web. If this is considered duplicating content, I’m a bit confused.
Secondly, I don’t care at all about page ranks, or readership, or anything like that – this is a site for me to simply college my writings, art, portfolio, in a single page, which uses paid hosting. I have no interest in advertising or driving page views whatsoever.
Thirdly, I’m somewhat surprised that WordPress then, seemingly, provides the option to post-out to other sites, but doesn’t permit, per se (given your comments about performance and images being lost), the reverse. That seems to me a strong disincentive to use WordPress at all.
4B. If all that you have said is true, then perhaps WordPress isn’t going to be useful to me – though you seem to be sensationalizing a bit, since I think 3 warnings about being suspended for potential actions on WordPress when I haven’t even decided if I want to use it yet seem extraneous.
I’m a bit shocked frankly also though, that if people embed all this social media stuff (most of which I don’t use actually) on blogs, including Twitter – that this isn’t considered a problem?! But original content posted on social media and reposted on WP IS?!
5B. Given what now seems to be a restriction on the ‘second’ reason I wanted to use WordPress (the flexible formatting being the first hurdle), I am forced to back up a bit and wonder, as I often have, what exactly is WordPress used for precisely? Is it simply to run standard issue blogs?
I specifically chose not to use SquareSpace for my site because they’re even more restrictive to the point that every SS site looks exactly the same, and also is heavily biased towards consumer sites with large photos, whereas I am mainly text based.
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You need to read this:
WordPress.com is a turnkey blogging solution. That’s not what you want.
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I’m aware of the two different variants – I use BlueHost, but haven’t actually installed WordPress.ORG (presumably that’s what I’m looking for), though I can’t say this has answered any of my questions.
The two seem quite similar from a themes/editing/technical perspective (both, it’s worth mentioning, made a big-to-do about their ‘social media integration,’ though as you’ve noted it seems like WP in both cases only goes one way (compose in WP, and then share out, rather than the reverse – I still find this odd)).
WordPress.COM or .ORG seems to be, from an advertising perspective anyway, ALL ABOUT flexibility (“we power 23% of the web” – that implies a LOT of formatting and technical/backend diversity) – so if anything now I’m wondering why my seemingly very reasonable and simple feature interests seem to be going down so hard?
What I want is just not that complicated for webware that powers 23% of all webpages. So I’m getting the sense that basically everything I want to do is possible, and it’s just a matter of how complex it is. That was NOT the message you’ve been sending…
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Perhaps I can pursue WP support for a conversation – I assume they’ll be happy to answer some of these questions…?
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I mean clearly WordPress seems ok (in 2013 anyway) with people embedding FB posts on their site – granted this is essentially being done manually, but they clearly wrote the scripts to format the post ‘natively.’
Basically if this could be automated that would be precisely what I was talking about…
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The two seem quite similar from a themes/editing/technical perspective. WordPress.COM or .ORG seems to be, from an advertising perspective anyway, ALL ABOUT flexibility
Simply put, no. WordPress.com is not about flexibility. It’s about getting a robust and sturdy and easy to use website up and running with a minimum of fuss.
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Well despite all of the above, I think I’ve solved all my issues, and I think WordPress will actually work out just fine – I’m honestly not sure @raincoaster what you’ve been talking about in many cases, (other than telling me WP will suspend me – I got that – I’ll worry about that when it happens) – I will just assume it’s my general ignorance. In any case, I’ve managed to find almost everything I want:
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http://demo.hb-themes.com/?theme=HighendThis premium theme seems to provide a huge array of spatially organized content on static pages, and makes it easy (as was also noted by the helpful first reply above @kathrynwp) to use a grid-based blog display which can be used to feature posts/sticky them/etc. Now their Blog Grid layout doesn’t seem to arbitrarily allow the posts to be moved around on the page (which is the original question), so I’ve asked their support about that. Even if it can’t, they seem to provide a wealth of options for moving things around and featuring them, side-bar posts, etc. which is close to what I wanted.
2. As for the compose in social media and re-post to my blog, that too seems to be both sanctioned and possible since I’ve found yet another WP official post showing that Google+ does embed successfully with formatting on WP. Again this is manual – just copy/paste the link, which is annoying, but it works.
If this can be automated, that would be amazing, but perhaps WP has commercial reasons for not wanting that to happen. I will continue to examine whether this process can be automated, but I’m not too concerned – arguably I might not want everything cross-posted anyway.
http://en.support.wordpress.com/google-plus-embeds/
***Assuming all the above is valid information, and that this theme isn’t extremely difficult to setup (some seem to comment that it is so I’ll find out from their support group)… I think this more or less resolves my quandary.
****And so far, while blog posts can be creatively rearranged, and moved around, stickied, featured, etc., the answer to my original question does seem to be no – blog posts arranged arbitrarily as if they were ‘cards’ on the page is NOT (yet) possible.
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It sounds like you’ve decided to go with a self-hosted WordPress install – good luck and hope you achieve what you’re looking for!
As for the compose in social media and re-post to my blo
You might want to check out IFTTT (If this, then that): https://ifttt.com/
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