Anthologizing the blog. I'm still looking for ways to grapple with the transience of the blog -- a writer's best work slides down the screen into the archive, most likely to be lost there. It occurs to me that we could take advantage of an intersection between the category feature of most blog software and the way the more complex of these products allow you to add additional text fields. Let's say you add a text field to your composing screen and call it "anthology" and when you're finishing a post you get in the habit of pasting a second copy of whatever seems most important from the post into the anthology field. This might be as little as a sentence or as much as a paragraph, say. Then you submit the piece and it appears on the blog in the usual way. In fact, nobody can see that anything special has happened at all.

But you create an additional page layout that offers the category list -- easy enough if the software works with categories. Maybe there are six or sixteen categories there. A reader clicks on the one that appeals and is presented with another new page layout, this one offering all the text from the anthology fields -- not the whole posts, then, but the highlighted anthology sections and including a link to the whole posts.

It's a way of trying to draw something out of the daily posts that will stand as a suggestive distillation of the broad project of the blog itself. Once you have the two new pages set up, you only have to have the discipline of choosing a selection for the anthology text field before you post any given new piece. Everything else is automated.

The results will depend on the quality of the category list, so you might find that you use the category list as a way of inquiring into the range of your own thinking -- that sounds worthwhile. And after awhile, you have these anthology pages that can serve the writer and readers as another, more focused way into the blog's project. [0 & P]