[Feature] Show/order the most recent posts classified by categories

[Iván Ruvalcaba]

Good day.

I would like to propose a new feature that, I think, could be quite interesting for your application.

The feature in question is to offer the possibility to show/order in the site's main index the most recent posts classified by categories, this way the visitor has the option to read only those that are of a particular interest and in a more coherent way (instead of just making a dump of posts without an order beyond the chronological one). For example:

## Gemlog posts

### How to

- How to install foo...
- How to manage bar...

### Opinion

- Is foo better than bar?
- The current web sucks!

### Re:

- Re: replying to the "Foo bar..." post.
- Re: My five cents on "Bar."

### Whatever

- Cute cat's picture of the day.

=> All posts…

The number of entries per category could be defined within the config file, i. e. 3 for each category. In case the reader would like to see more articles by the author, then the index of articles could be shown in chronological order regardless of their classification.

What do you think?

[Nathan Fisher]

I think the idea of this feature has merit, but it would be easy to create a bad implementation. Zond already has a tags feature, so the concept of categorization already has a framework. The danger that I see is if a person has a large number of tags, that the list of posts on the index page could be very long indeed. Therefore, I wouldn't want to imlement this without a way to limit the total amount that is going to be shown.

As a real world example of how this feature could get out of hand, my gemlog currently has a total of 47 tags in use. It is possible to tag a post with multiple tags as well, so it is likely that at any given time there would be a large number of duplicate links on the index page.

I have a few ideas on implementation

1. Limit the total number of posts displayed to a finite number as it is done now, but organize them by tag/category similarly to what you describe.
2. Limit the total number of posts displayed as it is done currently, but print the article summary and tags before each link
3. A configuration option to let the author decide which categories they wish to display on the index

I do have an idea for a related feature. It would be relatively easy to add an atom and/or gemini feed for each tag, which would give an easy way for a user to be notified of just those posts that fall into the categories they find interesting. I've seen that on a number of SSG's myself.

What are your thoughts on how to provide the categorization feature on the index page but also provide a way to limit the total amount shown? Of my ideas above I lean towards 2. There is already a summary field in the frontmatter metadata for gemlog posts, and it would make sense to actually display it somewhere. Currently it is only used in the creation of Atom feeds. Anyway, I believe more discussion on the the form the feature would take might be helpful.