Blog issues - "All" Category listings missing and first post is not showing up first

[kellypow]

Hi- I'm working on publishing my late aunt's memoir in blog format. It's basically a book, and I've been playing around with several workarounds to get it to be as reader-friendly as possible.
I've been treating the Categories as an index of Chapters, and I have one post that is a "Visual Table of Contents"

My issues:
RIght now the "All" Category is always there, and doesn't seem to be working properly.

I'm not sure it's practical for this blog because there is a *lot* of text, but even if it was, when I click "All" only 3 of 19 posts show up- chapters 1, 2...and 19. (??) A "previous" link is available, but then it just takes me backwards through the book, starting with chapter 18. I don't really understand why-- it doesn't seem to correlate with the order in which I created or recently modified the posts.

Really, I think I'd just like "All" category to go away and have my Table of Contents be anchored somehow.

Which is related to my second issue-- when I click the home page navigation that links to my blog page, my (supposedly first post) Table of Contents is NOT the first thing that shows up. It's defaulting to chapter 1. Is there a way to fix that?

I can't tell if I'm missing some key bits of information, or if I'm just trying to force it to do something it wasn't designed to do.

My project:

http://bit.ly/1RPdYfd

[Brodie · Accepted solution]

Hi @kellypow,

I'm getting a 404 error for that URL http://daleswan.weebly.com/read-the-memoir/category/a-visual-table-of-contents, but having consulted with one of our senior techs, the behavior is expected. The blog posts will be ordered by date, and although you have custom coded the theme to remove dates, the ALL category is going to display all blog posts in order of “most future date” to “most past date." The most recent chapter you've written would show up first since it was posted last.

You could manipulate the blog post dates so that the first chapter has the “most future date," and then set each subsequent post to earlier dates. For instance, since the dates aren’t visible, you could use the year 2100 for chapter 1, then 2099 for chapter 2, etc.

Another option is that each category you created exists as a URL on the site. So if you don't want to use the ALL category as it is, and don’t want to change dates, is instead of using our “categories” element, use “list of links” in the blog sidebar.

I hope this all works like you want! If so, all the credit goes to my senior tech.

[kellypow]

I think I might love you. Or your senior tech. Whatever. It worked! I manually entered all of the blog dates as you suggested and now it is working just as I'd hoped. Thank you!