Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Realizations: The (un) Natural Order of Things.

Read anything of two or more parts or chapters in a printed medium and you will read Part One first, followed by Part Two, and so on.

Now, go to your favorite BLOG (…hopefully this one!) and do the same thing.

I’ll wait, but you must promise to come back! …Or, you can just scroll down past the announcement of my UNCLE SCROOGE script and re-read the Four Parts of my 50th Anniversary Tribute to Huckleberry Hound.

Oh… you went to another Blog and came back? (Sigh! …No respect!)

Either way, your first view of the chosen subject WASN’T Part One (or the original post on the subject), was it?

If you did scroll through my “Huck posts”, you came first to PART FOUR, then scrolled back through Parts Three and Two… back to Part One.

The “Last-In-First-Out” nature of Blog posting changes – for all time – your intended order of things. The short period of time that Part One of Huck’s 50th Tribute was the ONLY such post, is the ONLY time that it would have been the first post on the subject that readers will see. And, so is the way of Blog posting.

To the point: Some of the things you will see here are pre-written, or have been written for another purpose. They may be too long to post in one part or chapter – and would read better in segments. This is certainly true of the POPEYE DVD Review that I intend to post here. It consists of TWO PARTS, which were written at different times. Part One covers my earlier, first impressions, and Part Two covers my impressions of much of the balance of the set.

Now, as Blog postings go, I would normally post PART ONE and later post PART TWO – but that would leave PART TWO to be viewed BEFORE PART ONE – even if I link to Part One at the very beginning of my post of Part Two.

Just curious… Is this the way you’d prefer to see posts on the same subject that will have more than one part? Or, if the text is already written and easily segmented, would you prefer to see Part Two posted – and then immediately followed by Part One, so that you get to read Part One FIRST while scrolling through this Blog?

Let me know what you think… Yes, I’m asking for comments, folks!

In the meantime, as an experiment, I’ll post the POPEYE DVD review in two parts – with Part One to be the “Last-In-First-Out” part – so that it will always show first.

Hopefully, once I do this and you see for yourselves a Part One IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWED by Part Two of a subject, it won’t be nearly as confusing as THIS POST is turning out to be… Lemme know!

4 comments:

Unknown said...

What I've typically seen in other blogs where there's a multi-part series of posts is that they'll post 'em in "last-in-first-out" order, and when the series is finished they'll write a final post with a properly-ordered table of contents.

That way, dedicated readers aren't treated to the very thing you want to avoid with new readers. ;)

Joe Torcivia said...

Travis:

First, thanks for being a “Dedicated Reader”!

So, the way you would handle the Huck Hound series of posts, for example, is to post them in the order that I did: 1-2-3-4 (with 4 being the first one seen, once “all is posted and done”)… BUT to close the series with a fifth post acting as “Table of Contents” (perhaps with a properly ordered series of LINKS) directing you to read the series in its intended order?

If so, I could try that when next I have a multiple part series. Not a bad suggestion.

This time though, after this discussion has run its course, I’ll post “Popeye DVD Review Part Two” immediately followed by “Popeye DVD Review Part One” at the same sitting.

This will result in your next visit to the Blog as reading “Popeye Part One” and then “Popeye Part Two”… just to see how it goes!

Joe.

Chris Barat said...

Here's a vote for Travis' idea. It makes perfect sense to me.

Chris

Joe Torcivia said...

Travis is clearly surging in the polls!

Keep ‘em coming, folks!