Blogger Finally Lets Me Make My Blog a FIFO. Whew.

Blogs are great but they have a huge disadvantage: they're LIFO: Last In First Out.

A year or so ago, I accidentally wrote an book on how to play Old-Time Music -- the kind of music I play -- using Blogger.

If you're curious, old-timey is to bluegrass as blues is to rock-and-roll: it's a predecessor, but a distinct genre. It's dance music, and I play dances. There's a jam at my house, every Wednesday, no matter what. It's been going on for ... lessee ... thirty-five years. Much longer than I've been a software engineer.

My band had been hired to play the Pilgrim's Progression dance weekend, in Lawrence, Kansas, over Thanksgiving, and I thought it would be useful to have some handouts.

I've been giving workshops at music-and-dance festivals two to three times a year since 1978, so writing the posts wasn't hard: I just started writing down the things I usually say.

Every morning, at 5am, my alarm would ring, I'd sit up in bed, grab my laptop, and write a post. Topics were random -- whatever struck my fancy on first waking.

I reckoned I'd start early and stop when I ran out of material.  By the time I stopped to print things out, because the weekend was imminent, I had about 150 pages of material.

I'd written a small book.

But the order? Aargh.

Blogger just isn't meant to be turned into printable material. Too bad, actually, because. except for that, it's an awesome tool. I ended up rearranging my downloaded posts into alphabetic order -- no worse than anything else, I figured -- and I printed it out that way.

When I started this time, I assumed that'd still be true. Should someone stumble on these posts one day and want to read them as a guidebook, chances are they'll want to read them from start to finish, not finish to start. Oh well.

Moments ago, I poked around a bit and discovered Blogger now permits this order. (Maybe it always did and I just didn't know any better.)

I've rearranged the order of the archives like this:

Design -> Edit -> Blog Archive -> Show Oldest Posts First

Could I also download it in this order and convert it to something printable? Doubt. But perhaps someday!