In my spare time, I enjoy writing short stories. I have over 150 that I've put on a site, categorized by character. However, some stories contain more than one character.

What I've been doing for that is I have an index set up for each character, and I cross reference them.

However, this is very difficult to update - every time I need to post a new story I have to go in, set up a page, update the main page, update all the characters pages, and then put it all on my website.

I was thinking about going over to wordpress and just keeping a blog, but the same issue of a need for an index arises.

I can tag them all by characters involved, which is wonderful, but it's still important to keep all the story lines in proper timeline, which overlap at points.

I was just wondering if any of you web gurus know of an easier way to create and maintain something like this. My primary concern is just ease of use for me updating, and ease of use for my readers to read the stories in chronological order depending on whos storyline they're following.

Any ideas?

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Hi Michelle. Interesting question. I think using a blog with tags (or categories) would be easiest for you to work with. But as far as the reader being able to read them in order...

A list of posts is generally sorted by date order - from newest to oldest. So if you copy the stories into blogposts in the right order, they should then sort in order as well. However, since it's newest to oldest order, the reader would have to read the posts from the bottom to the top. I suspect that's part of the problem.

Were you looking at Wordpress.com (hosted by them) or Wordpress.org (take software to your own site)? Com is limited in what you can do. If it was ok that they read from bottom up, you would be ok by copying the stories into posts in order. Even if you had to fit one in later (or you found you put some in the wrong order), you can change the date/time on them so they reorder.

If it's not ok to read from bottom up, I'm not sure there's any way you can do that in Wordpress.com. In the Wordpress.org site, there are several ordering add-ins that you might be able to use. But I'm not sure if any of them could be used at Wordpress.com.

There's also this "Write a Book" at Wordpress.com, which is interesting, but not sure it's what you are looking for.

At Typepad.com you can tell it to reverse the date order. That might work for you, but Typepad is not free. It's not expensive, but it's not free - the basic plan is currently 4.95 a month. They do have a free trial, so you could test it out first.

Anyway, haven't tried any of that so don't know if it will actually work. And not quite sure I've understood your problem properly. Maybe it might trigger something for you though.

Deb

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Deb at Ivy Freelance
Metrics, Marketing and Macros

No, that was a great reply, thank you I'm currently working with a free wordpress just to figure things out, though eventually I figured I would host it on my own site.

Thank you!

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