# Nitin Khanna says that in a way every page or post becomes required reading if you are writing about things you believe in and that matter to you, or if you write about existing content to bring it back into the public eye.
Here's the passage:
"I felt that the required reading page is better implemented by the blogger simply choosing to write about the topic they care about. If you want people to notice a certain article, just blog about it, quote it, and explain your take on it. Ask the reader for their takeaway too. Perhaps, in that sense, a required reading page is every page on your blog."
Some things will be more important, pivotal or foundational than others, they will get to the root of the matter and so be the more evergreen content.
He states something that I was considering myself: Dave Winer's original thoughts became required reading for my posts because they were the root. And every time we link to something (be it our own post or something external) that linked content also becomes required reading.
It's a nice idea.
But I think there's a difference between this contextually required reading and absolute required reading.
The former may give more information regarding a specific post or thread, whereas the latter gives greater insight into the mind or thoughts of the blogger as a whole. And that is the real purpose of the /required page as I see it.
While I agree that bloggers should highlight older posts more often, it doesn't solve the problem of always making them visible. The new post itself will get lost soon enough meaning the effect is only temporary.
It is also not viable for every page or post to be required reading as this becomes a massive overhead and barrier to entry for new readers. A single location for the most important or consequential things is more consistent and reliable.
Comments
# Going back through past posts in an attempt to distill the real essence of me as a blogger is hard. Really hard!
There are a few posts that I instantly know should make the cut but, as I always say, the blog is an ongoing conversation so there are often threads rather than individual posts.
As such, I'm wondering how best to present what I eventually come up with.
Just an idea, and I don't know how hard this would be to code (or maybe someone could create a plugin), but, one way to make important old posts visible might be to create a pinned-post area that rotates through the posts (a different one every time someone loads the page) based a special tag or piece of meta data you've added to those posts.
You could call the pinned area something fun, too, like Time Machine.
There are already plugins that do this but I wouldn't want it done that way as I feel it would clutter the UI.
Fair comment.