I've made a minor change in my monthly archive templates, in order to display monthly pages in chronological (rather than the default reverse chronological) order. I'm doing that because I've often found myself frustrated when finding a new blog that there's not a way to easily get caught up on past entries. Sometimes I'd like to be able to read the blog as a forward-moving narrative.
So now when you select my monthly archives, they'll run from the beginning of the month to the end, rather than the end to the beginning.
If you want to make the same change to your MT templates, go to the Date-Based Archive template and change the <MTEntries> tag to <MTEntries sort_order="ascend">
a narrative helps one get a mental grasp of what one is saying: it helps us understand the overall themes that one is writing about. I had a great conversation that i recorded with lisa sabater, who has a great blog called culturekitchen.com. we spoke about templates and how they influence meaning, poetics, remembering. her Phd work was in Baroque poetry, and she pointed out a certain tangental aspect to communication. Been thinking about that, and been thinking about the disagreement we had about how once one understands ones "Glog" then one sees the logic of what one has been saying.
My argument is that everything begins to make sence after the logic is defined: even schizophrenics have a logic once one becomes familiar with their minds. same thing with persons with short term memory loss: but it takes a certain creativity and self-referential point to make sense of things.
So by looking at the time sequence of the narrative, a different meaning of what one has been posting comes to mind.
My other friend, Kathy, who is studing poetry, spoke about John Dunn's poetics and this "Baroque" phenomena.
I think that when one percieves, one can go from being overwhelmed with a personal datashere, or blog, but with a narrative, one then understands the bloggers humanity.
When multiple bloggers post info, as in the smart mobs blog, one has a different interaction: it is held together conceptually very differently and hence the reader filters out or in what they want to learn from the blog. so narration is created by the act of surfing.
Its like glog pooling: i guess working on this idea in a goofy relaxed manner to figure out how persons network towards fixing a particular community problem gets at all sorts of personal narratives (ie as the article from the u of minnosota blogoshere pointed out). so in this case, i wonder how the collective narrative should be distributed?
i guess if one needs a goal directed forum; the importance of framing it conceptually in a fast forward narrative helps with setting up within ones mind how to solve a collective problem: but on the other hand, reading in reverse helps deconstruct issues and give another depth to the themes. Well, readers will do as they please anyway. its kind of reading a mystery novel fast forward or in reverse. sometimes its best to find out the end to figure out the details of the story and the subtlty of the clues: but life is not in past tense: though we do use remembering alot.
stef
i tried this first attempt at changing the "tag"
it sort of crashed my system: changed everything back to the way it was. what am i doing wrong>
it would be interestng to look at med data in this way: interesting that ancient greek originally was read from right to left then left to right. hebrew and arabic is right to left. chinese/japanese is up to down, left to right
thanks
stef
i also can't get the comment to link up with zephoria article on UI. great way to start writing an article titled.
"social networks toward medication error reduction"
Stef, it's hard to troubleshoot your problem without looking at your templates. What do you mean by "kinda crashed your system"?
ok, what i did was go to archive by date: i have moveable type by six degree. i cut and pasted just like you recommended, and then tried to build a blog post about william olser and everything just didn't work: i switched it back to the way it was and now seems to be working ok. the posts did not reverse.
i guess this is learning by fire: but looking at that java script language, i would really have to know what i am doing to be able to count blog enteries, and if i was to make it like a survey tool for a paper, i would have to figure out how to file and classify everything (data mine? sort? gmail as the search engine?). would be intersting to study the trackbacks. i could email the tag to you or email you my password so you could see what i did wrong.
also trying to figure out how to get a juicy sample size. i think there would be alot of persons who would volunteer an experience with a medication error and to write about the experience objectively. but maybe i am being too optimistic. maybe crosslinking the audience of several blogs could do this. would be an interestng methodology and selection criteria: very different from any other med journal i have read.
by the way, i think alex halavais is interested in this topic of clinical sousveillance: i think the HIPAA thing is complicated, but just surveying and then offering advice on how to prevent a medication error from the patients perspective is not violating any privacy issues, especially if everyone is annonymous. It also is community service. Alex said he is interested in health care blogging and diabetes education: this is more complicated. i think i can get one more physician who is into this. maybe someone who is semi retired and not doing the private practice thing. but we would need several more i think.
to get this into a med journal, it still has to go through one of them irb's
thanks for the advice and chance to spread blogger wings over here.
stef