"Order View" button enabling viewers to see entries in EITHER oldest first OR newest first

[pacific_rain_acim]

Title:
"Order View" button enabling viewers to see entries in EITHER oldest first OR newest first

Area:
Journal Entry Page of journals

Summary:
Please create a drop down box, link or button that would change the appearance of a journal's main page from the current default "Newest Entry First" to an optional view of "Oldest Entry First"

Description:
Ok :) The idea is basically what ever they do on shopping sites and in windows, where you can hit a button at the top of a column and choose to have the most recent or most distant date first. (Or highest price & lowest price.)

1. Issue to improve: Any journal that is about a process, telling a story or play, history, building of anything, diary, ...
For instance - I just created a journal to be focused ONLY on what I'm learning as I study A Course In Miracles. I wish that viewers of that journal could choose to see the beginning of the journey first - and so the First entry on top, second in second place, etc. In other words, I wish this journal had an option to show up Oldest Entry First. People starting to look at A Course In Miracles in the future might find it comforting to see what someone thought and be able to talk about it as they were reading the same pages. Also if I like it, and read it again in the future, it would be easier to follow along with myself the second or fifth time around.

2. Why my solution is best: IDK about "best" but it's easiest for the journal owner. The only other one I can think of is to use an enormously long system of tags...a tag for every 10 pages or every date? Or the option below - of adding stock journal styles that automatically show up as Oldest Entry First.

3. Problems: there would be code that would change the links at the top of every journal, that would probably be hard. Someone would just wake up and see a new button or link "Order View" next to "Recent Entries" - but for you guys it would probably be a big code?

4. Other Ways: There could be a set of the stock journal layouts that were ONLY set to "Oldest First." We could just go in and search "Oldest First" and a set of them would come up. It would be harsh, as it takes a lot of time to get your fonts, colors, etc right. But we could do it over if it really mattered to us.

*****Unless you created an Oldest First alternate down at the bottom of the layout options page - where you now have a choice of how your columns appear.

I don't know which would be cleanest and easiest for you guys.
* added button/link to each journal that switches the view of dated entries from newest on top default, to Oldest First.

* set of journal layouts that are just coded to default the Oldest First in the entries section

* a template that can be layered on or removed (like those column options at the foot of the style page)

Poll #9497 "Order View" button enabling viewers to see entries in EITHER oldest first OR newest first

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 57

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
16 (28.1%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
13 (22.8%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
6 (10.5%)

(I have no opinion)
21 (36.8%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (1.8%)

Comments

[ratcreature]

When I want to read in order from the oldest first I go to the archive, select the oldest in day view, which orders the first posted that day on top, and then go to the next day with the arrow at the bottom.

[kerravonsen]

Yes, this.

[montuos]

This method doesn't particularly help if you are, for instance, looking up entries by tag. Consider clicking the "projectname" tag and discovering as you go through that there have been some 50 items so far, but you have no idea whatsoever how many there are let alone what date the earliest one was until you click through and scroll down to it.

[msilverstar]

I would love to see my reading page in posting order, especially in combination with a way to see new posts only.

I know there's a way to do it per-page, though I can't remember what it is, but that doesn't address the problem of which page to start at.

[axiom_of_stripe]

I really like this idea, but my understanding is that it's not easy to retrieve the posts in this way. My "with changes" is that this might be something which could be offered as a setting on the journal, perhaps only for paid users, so that it could be optimized behind the scenes for those journals.

If this is something which could be reasonably done for any journal, then I'd vote for it as-is.

[ninetydegrees]

+1

[deborah]

I always like adding paid features. +1

[faere]

+1

[lorax]

+1

[instantramen]

+1

[cesy]

+1

[pacific_rain_acim]

I know nothing about code or the logistics of running an operation like these journals...but maybe there's an adaptation of the process that moved our journals from LJ? If you cross-post to another journal you lose the comment thread. But when we moved from LJ everything transferred except our journal style. Maybe that processes could be modified to work within Dreamwidth, to a new journal, that had a template that automatically ordered the journal entries by date oldest to newest.

Also, we can manually change the date in an entry, and the entries shuffle that way.
Maybe there could be an adaptation to that process?

[yvi]

Hmmm, I really don't think this would need more than a "ORDER BY [id] ASCENDING" instead of "ORDER BY [id] DESCENDING". But I'm not looking at the code at the moment.

[fu]

It's actually more complicated than that, because we cache entries! (More recent entries are more likely to be in cache, because they're more likely to have been viewed recently, that kind of thing)

[yvi]

Aaah, "easy to code" versus "easy on the servers", right. I just had a moment of "surely, it can't be that hard to just reverse the order" moment.

[fu]

Yeah -- sad, but that's it exactly.

[jeshyr]

+1

[zing_och]

+1

[tyger]

I don't know what'd be easiest, but you could also have it as part of archive view; view-month-by-subject already has things in date order, which is nice, but would be more handy if you could view the entire entries like that. (Or even just an abstract, though that's getting away from the OP a bit.)

[cheyinka]

An expanded archive view sounds really useful, so that's my with-changes vote.

[silverflight8]

This sounds good, yes.

[katherine]

Oldest at the top in some way would be wonderful.

[marahmarie]

I don't know whether to vote for or against this since Dreamwidth has Archive nav in place in most styles (afaik) that will allow you to access the full journal's worth of entries from the front page, so if someone wants to start at say, Jan. 2005 and work their way up to today's post(s) by following those links, I think they can. But that might be very cumbersome and laggy compared to just reverse sorting everything, which is a great idea, but I don't know if I want to deal with another button or link that I'll have to hide via CSS if I don't want to use it (or else deal with another button or link that I'll have to style with CSS if I do want to use it). Ah, decisions!

Can anyone tell me if they agree or disagree with just using styles that support front-page full Archive nav instead? By that I mean this, which I think shows the years instead of the days (or maybe I'm wrong - it's been so long since I've seen it on anyone's journal that maybe it's the other way around)?

http://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/options?group=modules --> type of calender display --> horizontal? Could that also work?

I'd be happy with a template ...

[pacific_rain_acim]

I'm new to any talk of how the journals actually work. So that might totally make sense...but I have no idea what it means.

sorry.

I'm so new to messing with this, instead of just updating or commenting, that when I tried to do the suggestion of many, and use the archive - it really was a mess. ( I have another journal with a lot of entries all the way back to 2006.)

But I'd be happy with a template that had a reverse order default. No button or link. It's more work for the user, but at least the journal would lay out right when you were done.

Re: I'd be happy with a template ...

[marahmarie]

You totally don't have to be sorry. I barely understood how they work myself until I had one for 2-3 years. I don't fully understand how they work now. I think no matter how long you use something online there's always more to learn, so it's just natural to not know it all at once.

But this suggestion got me excited about displaying the Archive function in different ways that might help people, so I enabled the horizontal style on my journal (it's up in the header now but completely unstyled at the moment). If you click through, you see it has a link to the current month (February) on the far left, each day has it's own link from 1-29, and the year has its own link on the far right.

But - I see it won't be helpful as far as getting you closer to what you want, now that it's live on my own space. The 2012 link leads to the actual calendar, not all posts for 2012, day links link only to the day in question for this year, and month links merely link to a list of posts for the month. So horizontal Archive nav is definitely not the answer, but at least now I know, which is more than I could say last night when I replied.

(I'm thinking if the hard-coding behind it could be re-written to get things closer to what you want, then an option could be included in module-settings to link the horizontal calendar directly to our posts - so, for instance, clicking the 2012 year link would give you all of 2012's posts in any order you want, clicking the Feb. month link would give you all of February's posts made in any year, and clicking a day link might give you all posts made on that day in any year. edit: But, in the same vein, another option could be included to display only years in the horizontal Archive nav, to simplify this a whole lot. But then again, I'm a Salvador Dali fan, which means all kinds of ideas melt together in my mind, and seem worth trying to me, but how practical they are might be another topic altogether).

Re: I'd be happy with a template ...

[pacific_rain_acim]

No, No :D :D :D That is much better than trying to use my archive! If we never get it to be truly intuitive for the new user, it will still be quite useable that way. I went to your earliest year, earliest month and first day of the month. You had 3 or 4 entries on the page and I just went to the bottom. If I really cared to follow along in order I could totally do it that way.

Thank you so much for all your thought and time on this. If they reject this suggestion line and it's clear that there will never be a more intuitive way - could you please send me instructions so I can fix mine like yours? pacific_rain or pacific_rain_acim

I also had a different idea but am supposed to put it in as a suggestion on this thread. ok, Thanks again :)

Re: I'd be happy with a template ...

[marahmarie]

could you please send me instructions so I can fix mine like yours?

I see we both use Transmogrified as our base style (on the one you call your "other journal", anyway) so it should easy to change your Archive to the horizontal position like I did: go to http://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/options?group=modules, look at the first section labeled Header, then at the second choice below that word, Calendar. From the dropdown to the left of the word Calendar, choose Header for the Calendar's home. In the dropdown box below that, choose Horizontal. Scroll down the page for the Save Changes button, click it, and you should be done, except for any custom styling you want to do with CSS. (You can use this same method to put the horizontal nav in the footer, as well - just choose Footer at each applicable step instead of Header).

(The numbering sequence in the Module section should take care of itself because DW's wizard should do it for you, but if it gets messed up somehow, you might want to re-number the modules manually to get them exactly where you want them).

[pacific_rain_acim]

A with changes possibility might be to change the Entry Creation Page a little instead. What about adding a check box to disable the date setter, and adding a check box to enable a new module that gave the option of manually numbering the entries.

It's already possible to change the dates on entries, so the numbering module might not work very differently. But the maximum number of allowed journal entries in one journal would have to be determined, because we'd have to number backward, to keep the largest number on top in the journal. (That's how I see the latest/ newest date - a larger number.)

The worst problem I've read so far is the mention of the limitations of the cache of the posts/journals and the servers. If I understand the problem correctly, most journals people only go to the top page or two to catch up. This journal people would consistently be going to various sections and almost ALWAYS going deeply past the first few pages. Although...for this particular journal that will still be the case after a while, it will just be people going to the most recent entries on top and going all the way to the back and reading forward. So idk...?