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Does anyone know of any blog tools that incorporate a timeline? What I'm essentially wanting to do is write little short mini stories about my life, but on each blog entry I'd want a timeline to appear above it and it would indicate when this story took place. And users could read the stories in chronological order this way. It seems that a stark majority of blogs focus too much on the date it was authored and no organization about when a blog is about. Any ideas?

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    If your focus is on when events took place, is there any particular reason you can't repurpose the publish date as an "event date" instead? Certainly the blog platforms I've tried allows setting the publish date, and it'll be reflected to the visitors; and since you presumably won't be writing about things that haven't yet happened, that published-in-the-future posts aren't visible shouldn't be a big issue...
    – user
    Jan 24, 2018 at 9:03

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The most obvious, simplest and platform-independent way to achieve your request is to format the blog title entries as:

YYYY-MM-DD : title

Another alternative, suggested by Michael Kjörling is to alter the publication date. This works very well if all your blog entries are about events in the past. I have used this approach for a news blog, in which stories about news in the media were published with their original publication date.

There are several wordpress plugins. For instance, this one seems to do the job by placing blog entries on a vertical scroll. It is likely that you may need to still follow Michael's suggestion in order to place things in the correct order.

Finally, if you are using wordpress and feel adventurous enough to try and tweak it yourself, there is a field called "meta" where you can store additional information, and, more importantly, you can retrieve it by modifying the PHP code of your template. You could store a date, retrieve it and display between the title and the main text of the blog post, for instance accompanied by a horizontal progress bar.

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  • This is great advice.
    – JP Chapleau
    Jan 24, 2018 at 15:46
  • Do you think you could find a different plugin, one that hasn't been abandoned? That's a red flag for security for a number of reasons.
    – Laurel ♦
    Apr 30, 2022 at 2:23

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