Overview:
This is easy enough to do, although there are a couple of risks that you need to be aware of as discussed below.
Blogger Posts and the Post-date
Each Post in your blog has a date-time value, which is called its "post-date". Normally , this is set to the date/time when you publish the post for the first time. But you can change the post date for any post, and you can do this either when you post it first or later on.
The post-date is important because it controls the order that posts are shown in:
- The post that appears first when a reader visits your blog is the one with the most-recent Post-date.
- If you have more than one post-per-screen, then the next-most-recent post is on the screen underneath the first one. And then the second-next-most-recent, etc.
When a reader is looking at any post, and they click Newer-Posts or Older-Posts, the post-date is used to decide what posts to show on the next screen.
This means that you can make your posts appear in the order than you wrote them (ie first post first, second post second, etc) by changing the Post-date so that:
- your first post has the most-recent post-date,
- your second post has the next-most-recent-date,
- your third post has the third-most-recent poste date
- etc
How to make your posts appear in reverse order, using dates:
1 Give your first Post a post-date (eg today), AND remember that date.
2 Give all other posts (even ones that you write next week, or next year) a post-date that is earlier than the post-date you picked in Step 1.
- If you want your posts is strictly reverse order, you need to give each one a date that is earlier than any existing post. This is quite easy: just look at the list of posts in Posting > Edit Posts and scroll to the bottom of the list to see the oldest date used so far.
- To do this, go to the Design > Page elements tab (old Blogger interface) or the Layouts tab (new Blogger interface).
- Choose Blog-posts (edit).
- Un-tick the date under "Post Page Options".
4 Remember to make the same date change for every post you write from now on.
Also, if it might be relevant for your readers to know when you wrote a post, make sure that you always manually put the date into each post.
Risks of this approach:
If you follow this approach, you will give a far-in-the-past date to pages that you never want to appear first. There is a risk that Google might convert the data behind older posts at some time. If your post-dates get too far into the past, then it's possible that they might not cope well this. This could be for reasons that seem logical, or because of things that are totally to do with the internal workings of Blogger's database, and make no sense to you at all.
Also, be aware that Google might choose to force the post-date to appear on posts at some time in the future. At the moment, they don't: it's your choice. But you cannot guarantee that they won't change their minds about this, one day. (Personally I think they probably won't, and I've built a couple of "real" websites that make use of the technique described here. Just remember it's not guaranteed.)
An Alternative Approach:
Adam of Too-Clever-by-Half has suggested a totally different way to display your posts in reverse order. I haven't used it, but think that it has a lot of potential in some situations, provided you are comfortable using Yahoo pipes and RSS feeds to display things on your blog.
He has also recently shared another approach he found, which uses a script to manipulate elements within Blogger, and so is more robust than his first approach.
Related Articles:
Changing the post date for any post
Giving your blog a home page
Using a gadget instead of a post as your home page
Stopping certain pages from ever appearing on the home page
Blogs, Blogger and blogger, Posts, Pages and Screens - understanding how blogger works.
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