Touchstones

I use two blog pages. One has all my posts, it is in the unlinked section of my site. I make each post a member of a certain category. That is the first step.

I have a second blog page which is in the linked section of my site. Each post in the blog contains one or more summary blocks pulling content from the first blog page by category. Sometimes there is more than one block if I need more than 30 items in that post, for example, Soul Stories contains a lot more than 30 items so there are two blocks.  I give each post in the second blog,  the front-facing one,  a category, and that category is what the archive block uses. I keep the second blog simple, with no image blocks in it, no excerpts just the summary blocks and the title. I use code to hide the publication date of all posts in both blocks. If I think the reader needs to know when it was published I type that in myself at the top or bottom of the post. 

This takes a bit of work to set up but once done any new post just needs a category and or make it a featured post to put it at the top of the page. I use the featured option a lot. I may want for some good reason to feature an older post so all I need do is toggle that option and there it is at the top of the page. 

Avenue is the template I use and the blog only lists posts, no wall or grid option as in 7.1 or some other 7.0 templates. That is what first prompted my use of summary blocks, but then I realized I could use a pull-down menu to find those posts so I moved my summary blocks from a normal page to the second blog.