Would blog followers be alerted when I add a whole batch of sub-pages?
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Second domain suggestion — Thanks for your constructive thinking, Tandava! This is indeed one of the options I had already begun to consider myself.
But this way-out also seems to bring its own problems, some of them again tied to WordPress limitations (unless I’m mistaken).
One main thing is, WordPress seems to insist on archiving blog posts in the order they were published. As far as I can see now, this means that this new blog would not produce an archive where readers can use the “previous” and “next” buttons to walk through history in a natural manner.
Example: WordPress would archive the posts in the publication sequence “10 Jan 1933” – “9 Jan 1645” – “8 Jan 1971” – “7 Jan 1890” and so on (with the last published one first, in this example). See how the years randomly jump to-and-fro?
To have that same posts archived not in publication order but in chronological order, they would need to be archived in the order “9 Jan 1645” – “7 Jan 1890” – “10 Jan 1933” – “8 Jan 1971“. This supposes a kind of dynamic archive database where new posts are not archived at the end or start of the list, but somewhere in the middle: at the proper place of the year they’re referring to.
Only in this way, you would get a properly ordered over-all, timeline-kind of history archive. And of course that’s what I want! (That, btw, also is how I sort the entries in my present unwieldy catch-all history page)
I’m not 100% sure yet, but I fear that WordPress is simply too primitive to be able to handle this kind of thing. -
that WordPress is simply too primitive
Not primitive at all – you seem to be the one out of however many that are looking for custom database access – since WordPress.ORG is built on a standard database – why don’t you wander over to WordPress.ORG and make friends in the Plugin section and see if someone has a Plugin that does custom sorting in the way that you want –
There are many reasons to stay with the WordPress architecture if you can and not start over with a blank site — when I used to help over at .ORG & had a .ORG install I remember some Plugin’s that allowed some custom sorting
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Maybe you are right. But if you are, that means I would have to move my entire site or sites (stayontop.org is now hosted at wordpress.com) away to some other provider and reinstall it there. For WordPress.org plugins are simply not supported at all within WordPress.com. Meaning that probably I should have said more precisely that WordPress.com appears to be a bit primitive ;-)
I would not be particularly looking forward to such a migration process to some other hosting company, with all its risks, extra chores etc. But maybe in the end I will have no other option.
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But because Timethief has just told me (above) that such a number of links and subpages falls outside WordPress’ pitiful technical limit (only 88 pages!), I will now need to find some alternative solution…
It seems to me that you are looking for a heavy weight CMS (content management system) like Joomla, or a wordpress.org install with multiple plugins. Best wishes no matter what you decide on.
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A not very elegant solution for getting them chronological (in terms of the date of the thing in the post) would be to just give them published dates on the correct order. That could get quite messy, but in theory would work, as the dates go back to 1900 (if I’m not mistaken, would be a piece of cake if it went back further to your earliest date!).
Obviously you’d need to assign perhaps each decade to one year so 1900=1000, 1901=1010, etc.Then each real year can be a month (Jan=1000, Feb=1001, etc). Then each real month can be over two days, then each day an hour (over the two days).
Anything after 2000 could have the real date
Would take a bit of work, and may confuse readers if the dates are showing 1900, but a quick note would allay that (or hide them if possible).
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Thanks all for your constructive support. I do realize that I should primarily blame myself for wanting things that WordPress (com) cannot yet provide.
Still, I think my requirements are not wholly exceptional — it’s quite probable that in the near future more blogs will develop into a similar drection, and will then run into the same kind of walls. So perhaps it might not be a bad idea for the WordPress (com) staff to reflect on how WordPress might adapt to somewhat changing blogging habits and requirements in the coming years?
I will not pretend that I, with my blog, am providing pure premium quality content. I’m just an individual with limited resources, trying do as best as I can. But in a way my problems have to do with a general trend towards less superficial and more quality content on the web (quality meaning more in-depth information, presented in more adequate structures).
This is a trend we can see in many blogs today: it is demonstrated, for example, by the growing popularity of “longreads” as a quality alternative to the traditional short blog posts.
It would be great if WordPress could offer some more technical options to support this general trend towards higher-quality blogging.
PS Thanks for the link Tandava. Unfortunately it doesn’t solve the problem as it just offers a way to reverse the publication order (from recent-oldest to oldest-recent posts). I would need something different: a way to sort posts by their title or by a tag.
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You can display up to a maximum of 100 posts on a post or a page by using the display post shortcode. Note the display by categories, etc options. http://en.support.wordpress.com/display-posts-shortcode/
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@Danielisreading:
Re-dating them looks like a nifty idea…
At the moment I still am brooding on some kind of improvised solution that will allow me to somehow keep everything within the same site (domain) I have now.
But if I go for the using-a-subdomain solution, meaning those history entries will be archived as regular posts, I will most certainly try out if your idea works! -
You know, for $30 a year you can use CSS editing to exclude one particular category from the main page of your blog, and if you use an RSS widget, you can display the posts of that category in your sidebar.
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It seems that you are trying to re-invent the wheel. Some very complex books, and entire encyclopedias, handle vast amounts of information with nothing more than a table of contents and an index.
If you title your various posts something like this: “Specific topic: Remainder of title,” the Search Widget will let your readers find your Posts (not Pages) about the subjects they’re looking for.
As for a table of contents, forget about the archive code. Instead you can set up a few Pages, designated for specific topics, each of which can contain hundreds of links (which you’d have to add manually). Each of those Pages can be divided into sub-topics, using a brief list at the start, coded to work as “jump links” to a specific section below. I do that at my blog. It works for me.
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Maybe some of you are curious to see what kind of solution I’m beginning to try out right now?
In the footsteps of what some of you suggested I’ve setup a second blog (not a subdomain but one with a more descriptive name) that should serve as a kind of timeline-archive for my daily history items.
The idea of Danielisreading, to sort things in the proper chronological order by deviously pre-dating each post, may be working even better than he himself thought, as there seems to be no 1900+ bottom limit for the years.
So suppose I want to add an item about an event that happened 8 Januari 1871, I could probably archive it as a post written on that date — which will automatically put it in the correct chronological order with all other items archived in the same way! Only the few BC items (before the year zero) will require some kind of special solution.
I’m not yet sure though if the method of quoting these daily items through RSS in my other (main) blog’s sidebar will work: because I will need to also preserve the image that comes with each text item, and the unexpected dating might prove a problem here.
Anyway, I’m sure there’s still a lot of tinkering awaiting me, but I do have some hopes now that I will get this thing really working. If you take a quick look at my just-begun experiment at the new domain http://historyofmentalhealth.com/ you will see it showing a test post that was “written” January 8, 784. That’s early Middle Ages, so maybe even if all the rest goes wrong, I can at least claim a record now for the oldest WordPress post ever ;-)
Well, while still muddling along, again my thanks to you all. Your comments in this thread have been really helpful to me.
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That’s interesting. You know you can do a lot of tinkering with RSS feeds by piping them through Yahoo pipes. It is powerful but I have to admit not that easy to use.
I use a pipe to combine several feeds and display the most recent posts over a number of blogs in my right-pane and on a google sites page.
It would be possible to write a pipe that sorted your posts by date ignoring the year – so (on 10 jan) the most recent posts are those on 10-jan any year – then 09-jan and so on. You could then display the top 5 (for example) from this list in your sidebar.
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Just a brief final update in case someone wants to know what problems I ran into.
I’ve given up on the pre-dating posts idea. In principle it did provide a nice timeline-like order, but in WordPress it also caused an avalanche of other problems.
Publishing posts with a date like “Aug 14, 1825” did work but it messed up the pushing of new posts to followers etc. Publishing them with the actual date and then changing the date afterwards did not work well either because WordPress preserves the publishing date as part of the post URL itself: so this produced URL changes, meaning any of the original post links would now give a 404 Not Found page.
There were other problems, like, when using “?order=asc” for chronological multiple-post pages, the top of those pages would look right but then the WordPress infinite-scroll mechanism (which I hate anyway for its pushing the sidebar out of view, but that’s another discussion) would begin to totally mess up the post order lower down, even showing some posts multiple times on the same page…
In short, also because of my limited technical knowledge, I’ve decided to go for simplicity, devoting my time to the actual content instead of this kind of problems…
Should people ask me why these historical posts keep appearing in a random instead of a properly chronological order, I will simply tell them that unfortunately, WordPress is not able to re-sort posts in a any kind of meaningful order… (and of course, that I was not smart enough to find a creative solution for this problem)
Well, I guess this is it. I will mark this thread as “resolved” now, even though the term “resolved” does not seem appropriate. Thanks one more time to you all.
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