Communication Agility

In a recent thread on the Blogger development group, someone asked, "How do you reverse the chronological order of a weblog to display the blog entries from oldest to newest posts?" The answer was a bit convoluted and required the following script changes to the Blogger display template.

<script type="text/javascript">
var archives = new Array();
<BloggerArchives>
archives[archives.length] = new Array('<$BlogArchiveURL$>', '<$BlogArchiveName$>');
</BloggerArchives>
for (var i=archives.length-1;i>=0;i--)
{
document.write('<li><a href=\"' + archives[i][0] + '\">' + archives[i][1] + '</a></li>');
}
</script>
</ul>
<noscript>
<!- for non-java enabled browsers -!>
<MainOrArchivePage>
<ul><BloggerArchives>

I consider myself pretty technical, but I might have a difficult time implementing this change. The very notion of blogging is all about non-technical publishing; this runs in the face of the true spirit of blogging and places unnecessary demands on users (specifically business users) that simply want results.

In MyST Blogsite, this is how the same task is accomplished:

To sort by each post's modification time and dated (instead of its creation time and date) and to show the modification time, simply add these URL parameters:

or to sort by the post's name:

and so on.

This is communications agility.