Can blogging be permanent?

Seizing on a notion at the end of one of AVI's posts, I got to thinking about how you could make something more connected, and perhaps more useful, and (fond hope) more permanent from blog posts. Otherwise, as AVI says, "each passing year sends them further down the chute."

To make posts somewhat less ephemeral requires that we organize them differently.

Some bloggers put a "best post" list in the sidebar--simple but limited. Suppose we took the time to evaluate our posts and make weighted indexes like that for all of them we thought worth the light of day.

It might be possible to generate various tree views easily if Blogger allowed categories to have 3 values: name (already there), relevance to this post ("this is tangential" you would record as near 0, "main subject" record as near 100), and your own estimation of the quality of the work (0=please don't look at this, 100=I think I'm Shakespeare). Assign default values of "50"--only the name is necessary. A 4'th number might be a relative organizer not related to quality; as in "read this first, this second, etc."

If the reader clicked on a subject category you could show a list of posts you think the best you've done in that subject, organized by quality. Or you could display a tree of posts, with the list from the selected category as the trunk and things you think more or less related as branches. Or you could create a "book" of posts, with some kind of sidebar showing where the current post is within the book.

If you find your thinking has evolved on a topic, instead of deleting the old post you leave it here for history's sake and display a "see this other post" link whenever the old link is in a list.

There's no getting around the need for time and thought if you want it organized--no google algorithm will help us.

The reader must be able to bypass any of this for a "show the most recent" view. Always be kind to faithful readers.