Should blogs have a 'new reader' button that changes the sorting order of the posts?

Question

For people who have been subscribing to blogs and following their updates, the important bit is the information that is new, and to have some convenient way of locating older posts. However, I wonder if the new subscribers end up with a poor experience because they have to read through the contents backwards and in a rather awkward way because they need to get up to speed with all the previous contents, and most of the templates for blog websites don't allow you to do that easily.

Just wondering if anyone has thought of designing or catering for both new and existing subscribers to blogs by simply incorporating some feature that allows them to order the posts in chronological order, so that it is easier for them to go from the oldest to newest?

Or if examples already exist out there, can people who post answers provide references to sites with such features?

Answer 1

I'm not too much into the blogging world to say if it's common for the content to be "coupled" enough to require subcribers to "be up to date" and I'm not sure if they are necessary expecting to find the "missing piece of information" in the same blog neither. If you know they do, some options may be:

• If new posts are related with some older ones, the author could try something similar to Wikipedia, linking parts of the current post with older posts. That would probably need some extra effort from the author but I think it also offers no just a better experience for new users but for everyone.
  Following a basic UX principle as "dont rely on user memory", "older" users could just forget what they're reading about and it would be great for them to get a quick and easy way to remember. The founder of stackExchange community Jeff Atwood does this in his blog Coding Horror.             

• Add sections like "recommended reading", "most popular posts", etc, so users can get a general idea of what you want them to read and what most users have read.

• Provide an "Older posts" link. Good features for that page could be pagination (Showing 10 post of 98), ordering (older first, newer first) and categorization (filter by tags for example).
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Answer 2

There are plenty of examples out there to pick inspiration from. Here is a use case from stackexchange app itself:

The social feed has exploded and there are plenty of streams other than just the latest feed. You will find Newest post, trending, top posts, active posts and so on...

Depending on the application/delivery channel you need to identify which of the posts the users will be interested in the most. This below case you will notice the latest posts are listing by default in an app.

Apart from defaulting the feed, it is also a good practice to provide the users with an chance to explore and switch between the feeds. This allows fore exploration and keep the users engaged.

You might also look into notifying the users about the post activity. This can be an active process i.e via notifications or in a sublte way like youtube does below in its app with a simple blue dot under the subscribed channels!!