Interesting. I was just thinking about my last post, trying to find a good example to show the difference between a blog journal view versus a summary view and I think I found one that is quite common. If you’ve ever used Flickr, you know that its photo stream format is very similar to a blog format. You can post a picture every day describing what is going on in the picture along with the post. Even more so, you can tag each post so that others can find your information on a global level.
However, at the same time, you can take a selection of these photo posts and group them together into a photo set which is nothing more than this summary view that I’m talking about. By doing so, you are again tagging your information but at a different more local and meaningful level to you. These posts could be in sequence right after another in the same time frame or they could be spread over years. For example, I could have a photo set summary of my travels in Mexico which would probably be in the exact same sequence from my daily posts. Yet, at the same time, I could also create a photo set summary of selected photo posts of vacations that I have done from around the world over the span of my life.
Therefore, in creating my summary view how I wish it could be, it would nice if it could follow the same logical format as how Flickr handles these summaries or groups. When you are viewing a photo set summary, your next and previous navigational elements relate to the summary view you are in. Therefore, in my journal blog, if I had a summary view talking about my best posts that talk about culture, I’d like my summary view’s previous and next nav elements to follow the flow of the summary view instead of following the flow of the journal posts (which is how most blogs systems work today).
How to achieve this though is the question. I mean right now it is partially there. When you look at your journal filtered by category, the previous and next nav buttons relate to the those specific journal entries relating to that category only as well. Yet the problem right now (at least in Squarespace anyways) is that I can’t make that category view as a separate module so that I can add a page header to it (describing the the summary view). Even more so, it would be nice if this initial summary view could give you a brief excerpt on each post (kind of like how Flickr shows you a thumbnail view of the photos in the photo set).
