Alternate blogging set ups?

August 18, 2009 8:53 AM

Are all blogs linear scrolls or is there someone out there who presents entries differently (allow for shuffling of posts or presents it like iTunes presents your selection)?

I am trying to find some other way to present my web site -- I knew of someone who was trying to use artificial intelligence with the blog model and got in touch with them, but that fizzled out. I had my fill of that set up -- it's extremely limiting, especially if what you write isn't dated...

posted by Alexandra Kitty to computers & internet (7 comments total)

If what you write isn't dated, then it's not really a 'blog', per se.

Tumblr has some grid/horizonal layouts, as does Drupal panels, but these things are more CMS-related and not strictly a blog.
posted by unixrat at 8:56 AM on August 18

Many blogs have categories which posts are assigned to, and there are usually individual pages per category which consist only of the posts in that category.

Many blogs have search engines, permitting the reader to locate specific posts.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:59 AM on August 18

If you want an example unconventional blog layout to avoid, look no further.
posted by oinopaponton at 9:06 AM on August 18

On my booklog with reviews [in Dutch] I use several different approaches. The home page is traditionally linear, but only shows titles and authors of the last books reviewed.

These links to single paged reviews. If there are related reviews, these are mentioned underneath.

However, any author will get its own page as well, showing any reviews on his or her books in alphabetical order.

Apart from those, there's a page with all authors in alphabetical order, and one with all book titles, and there are lots of pages with the books alphabetically ordered by categories.

The problem with these reviews is, because I don't follow the market, that they are timeless, in a sense. And that the design of most weblogs is based on that they seem to thrive on the here and now. So, I've simply tried to make the content approachable through as many ways as I can think of.

There's surprisingly little attention for problems like these, I've found. Yet, I hope.

In the end, any good internal search engine can do miracles. Still, if you don't want Google, and its ads, it's difficult to get something as powerful and easy to ease.
posted by ijsbrand at 9:42 AM on August 18

Drupal can be set up as a blog where your posts are arranged any way you like, in terms of layout or the order, grouping, hierarchy and so on. I use Drupal for all of my blogs, and use a combination of the Book feature (grouped/hierarchal posts), post-stickiness (keep on top), and more to arrange and shuffle my entries, since at least two of my sites/blogs are used as reference sources. For example, I will often push up an old entry to the top of the front page (and into the RSS feed), arrange posts according to topic for certain pages, and things like that. In addition to the out-of-the-box Drupal, I use a module (add-on) called Views extensively. Other people use something called CCK (Content Contruction Kit) for even more flexibility, but for me I find that to be overkill. It's impossible to explain the ins and outs of Drupal in a short reply like this, and I don't deny that Drupal has a rather stiff learning curve for many people, but it might be something for you to look into.
posted by thread_makimaki at 10:53 AM on August 18

Here is a blog pretending to be a wiki.
posted by ubermuffin at 6:09 PM on August 18

Why not go the whole hog and use a wiki instead if you want to break out of the linearity of the blog format? Mediawiki, the software which drives a certain online encyclopaedia, is very simple to set up if you have access to PHP and MySQL, and it's moderately easy to customise the appearance.
posted by nja at 11:18 PM on August 18