Slicing the Blog

Blogs are a chronological thing headmost. So we want to browse backwards in time. But its content is tagged as well so you'd like to browse backwards in time within a certain ``slice'' of the blog. That's exactly what I've implemented now: every SubjectCategory topic serves exactly that purpose. The layout of the SubjectCategories is the same as the blog's frontpage including the sidebar with its different sections: comments, latest postings, archive and blogroll. They all only display those items that are tagged to be in the current SubjectCategory; comments are reduced to those that refer to postings in the current category; the archive section displays only those months that have postings in the current category etc. Obviously that makes sense but not all blogs work like this. Mostly, they only offer a time-based access into the archive, not taking the categories into account.

The scenario unfolds further in a multi-author blog: you'd like browse the archive conveniently following the trace of a given author. From that point of view the ``author'' property of a posting is just a tag like the SubjectCategories themselves but we call it different. The BlogAuthor pages look'n feel exactly the same way as the SubjectCategory pages but offer the ``author slice'' of the blog.

Rounding up, all topics of type SubjectCategory or BlogAuthor and the WebHome itself are of type FrontPage also to express that they slice the blog in a certain way. We've got special TopicFunctions that are -- strictly speaking -- of type FrontPageRenderer but as we don't have a hierarchical type system (you have to stop somewhere sometimes) we just use them that way: they render a FrontPage being of a somewhat more complex layout. Providing different FrontPageRenderers offers you a kind of choice if you like one or the other way of displaying blog slices. FrontPageRenderers can be used from outside the blog web to display, for example, only the most recent postings in a category, maybe even spanning a set of blogs all hosted in your TWiki. But that's not there yet.

Finally, we also have other means to connect postings marking them as being related (we blogged that already). But I still miss one other feature called ``followups'' or ``parts'' or ``episodes'' of entries that make up a longer story and then allows to link up or down in the series. Not there yet also.