Sometimes you come across a blog that is just incredible. After reading the latest ten to twenty posts, you want to read more. Instead you subscribe to the blog, figuring you’ll just read the new posts as they come in.
An entire untapped archive of posts are waiting to be read. It’s a shame that these older posts won’t get read by someone who finds the site interesting.
What if blogs with a deep archive have a feature that subscribes you to posts in reverse chronological order? Every day you get a blog post that goes one post deeper into the archive.
With this reverse chronological subscription, you get to read all of a site’s posts over time. Sometimes a blog might not make sense to read going backwards in time, so maybe there could be an option to subscribe from the very first post, and move forward.
For example, today I discovered a great blog cogdogblog.com by Alan Levine. I commented on three of the recent posts:
- Does The Web Come in My Own Size? Or Only Medium?
- Archiving Old WordPress Sites as Static HTML
- Granny’s Stories– from Audio Tape to TapeWrite
With so much good stuff on this site, I subscribed by adding the RSS feed to my Feedly. However, all of his older posts are now hidden away from me. I could certainly go back to his site manually and explore some more, but that takes too much energy and intention. For the past decade, we haven’t manually visited blogs anymore, instead we subscribe to their RSS feed, email newsletter, or Twitter feed. The newest updates come in, and we read the stream from this point forward.
We could use this same subscription method to read the archives of a site! Instead of getting the newest posts via the current subscription methods, we could get the archived posts, one per day. A nice steady stream diving back into the archive. I should figure out a way to set up Twitter to make a tweet once a day, and then move backwards through my archive. How could I do that? Anyone know how?
Or maybe the Twitter account should start from my first blog post on September 28, 2001 and tweet one blog post a day chronologically in order. I’m going to investigate how to do this. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.
(Image from Samuel Zeller of Switzerland)