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Change The Sequence Of Your Posts

If there's one question, seen occasionally in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger?, that confounds me, its a simple one.
How do I change the order of my posts?
or
Why does my blog display the newest post first? Where is the option, to change to oldest post first?
It is very difficult to respond both correctly, and helpfully, to both questions, equally well.

Blogger does not provide a dashboard setting, to change the post display sequence. Post sequence is only changed, by altering the date and time of the posts.

Long ago, changing the post sequence was simple.

Change the date and time of each post.

You could use the Schedule wizard in Post Editor "Post settings", select "Set date and time", and change each post, to whatever value you require. Each changed post would have a new URL - and would display according to the new URL.

To prevent various problems, caused by uncontrolled date / time changes, Blogger later changed the post editor. Now, once a post is published, you can't back date the post date or time.

The key word there is "published". You can't back date a published post - but you can re publish a post, by saving it as Draft. Just un publish each post as Draft - then use "Set date and time", back date, and Publish again.

You can back date as far as 1970. If you need the blog to display dates preceding 1970, you'll have to use "fake" dates, as you back date.

You can use the Posts menu to set up to 50 posts, in one step, as Draft. You will have to use Post Editor, one post at a time, to back date and re publish, however. This will be some tedium, for you.

Now, be careful here! If you resequence the posts after they have been indexed by the search engines - and if the resequencing involves URL changes - you're going to have "404"s from broken links. This is going to hurt reader and search engine reputation.

If your resequencing involves URL changes - and you care about the reputation of the blog - plan to add a custom redirect, for each post that gets a new URL, pointing from the old URL to the new URL. And this will be more tedium, for you.

But at least there is an answer to

Where is the option, to change to oldest post first?

The answer simply involves some repetitive work, on your part.

Comments

ugh......that sounds tremendously tedious and time consuming. I was hoping to "easily" accomplish the same thing.......
Les, said…
Well, to me, that's a good answer. Sorted! Thank you
stephenw said…
Wow this Blog is a great resource. So glad I found it and it has answered my original query as well. I'll be back here often to build my Blogger knowledge.
Rather than fake dating which would destroy the value of the time stamp, could we have a content index? It would save a lot of time re-indexing with pages and other techniques so that readers can follow a subject intuitively
Nitecruzr said…
Small Business,

That's a good question, thanks.

Instead of a static index - that you'd have to spend time building and rebuilding - you might consider using dynamic accessories, like keyword and label searches. Then spend more time writing blog content.

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2015/04/use-dynamic-accessories-with-dynamic.html

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