You might have a lot to say, but you don't want to overwhelm the readers of your blog. It's a good idea to break up your posts into several shorter ones. That way, people don't have to scroll through an intimidating 10,000-word post. Sequences help with that. Write several blog posts and link them up so that people can follow the path.

I've posted many blog posts that belong in sequences. Some of them are presentations and transcripts that I've spread out across time to make it easier for people to digest. Some of them are blog posts that I've organized after realizing how they're related. I used to link these posts by hand, updating each post with a link to the next one and linking each new post with the one before it. Creating one page that listed all the posts meant yet another page to keep up to date. It took time to set up these links, and I didn't always remember to do so.

When I look at my website analytics, I find that most of the visits are to pages that are deep within my archive. Besides the suggestions from Similar Posts, I also want to give people clearer paths through the content. That way, they can learn on their own. I wanted to make it easier to manage those trails through my blog posts without needing to edit many pages.

Organize Series is a WordPress plugin for sequences of posts. I like the way you can adjust the order of posts in the sequence. I customized Organize Series so that it didn't show the list of posts at the beginning of each post, but I kept the other defaults. Organize Series adds links to the next and previous post, and it also adds a link to a page with all the posts in the series. I like the way that Organize Series makes it easy for readers to see many posts on the same page.

To see Organize Series in action, check out the series for A Visual Guide to Emacs. It links together three of the sketches I've made. I can add more posts as I publish them. You can also see the previous and next links in a post that belongs to a series, like this one for Adding Color, the second lesson in this Sketchnote Lessons series. Check out the rest of my series too.

The Organize Series plugin is free, and there are commercial add-ons. I haven't bought one yet, although I find a few of them tempting. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to adding more series as I make my archive easier for people to use. Hope this helps!

Suggestions:

• If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog and you write sequences of blog posts, give Organize Series a try.
• Curious about what I'm learning? Suggest some sequences for me to organize or write about!