But in thinking about providing a permanent home for my writing on the web, this kind of chronology isn’t very useful. Who cares that I wrote this post in 2015, and this one in 2017? Organizing posts that way is only useful if someone is reading along as the collection is being written. For a permanent writing home, with writing from a year ago as well as writing from ten years ago, chronological order isn’t that useful. Who’s going to sift through a hundred pages of old posts?
Part of the question about the ordering of posts on a website comes down first to what the actual content is. Is it posts, pages, articles about particular topics, short notes?
Most blogs typically default to a particular time ordered display, but also provide search and archives for content by topical headings (tags/categories) as well. Digital gardens and wikis are set up with no particular hierarchies and one is encouraged to wander. Most social media notes and photos are created in a time only order.
There aren't enough online zettelkasten yet to look at what that might entail, though affordances there are likely to be similar to that of digital gardens which let you pick out something via keyword and then follow links from one thing to the next.
These are interesting questions for publishers as much as they are from anticipating what one's intended or imagined audience might be looking for.
</figure>
</figure/>
<figcaption>history flow is a tool for visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors. In its current implementation, history flow is being used to visualize the evolutionary history of wiki* pages on Wikipedia. </figcaption>
</figure>