Tips for Medical Bloggers on Blogger.com: Topic sections on the blog front page rather than random posts in reverse chronological order

A physician blogger asks: "I would like to put a book review section in by itself. I would really like it to look more like sections on the front page of a newspaper that I could add to separately than one big long blog of such disparate topics."

There are several ways to do this:

1. "Future date" posts always show on the front page.

Fix the number of posts on the front page, for example, to seven (7). Only those posts will show on the front page and they will be your topic sections. Publish the "topic section" posts. Then go back to edit them and change the date to a year in the future, for example, 2011. Then you can keep posting to your blog as usual. The RSS feed will update but only the 7 fixed "future date" posts will show on the front page.

See an example here: http://allergycases.org/

More on the topic:

"I use Google Blogger to publish not only blogs (with posts in reverse chronological order) but also "regular" websites in which the article at the top of the page is not always the newest one. To do this, I often choose a date in the future (for example, 2010) which makes the desired post to stay on top. The "scheduled post" Blogger update eliminated this option but fortunately, there is a workaround:

"We know that some bloggers currently use future post dates in order to keep one post at the top of their blog for a while. Though we recommend that you use a Text page element for this, you can still get this old behavior with just one additional step. First, publish your post with the current date and time. This will publish it to your blog. Then, once it’s published, edit the post to change the date to the future and publish it again. We don’t re-schedule posts that are already published, so the post will stay on your blog but sort to the very top."

References:
How to Use (and Stop Using) Scheduled Posts in Google Blogger

2. Add "text element" to your Blogger sidebar. The text will always show in the sidebar:

References:
Layout Guide. Blogger Help.

3. Use a 3-column template.

To make your blog look more like a newspaper front page, you can use a 3-column template, in addition to the 2 tips explained above.

In any case, the use of a wider (stretch) template is recommended, for example, Minima Stretch.

References:
New blogger templates (XML) 3 columns
Where can I find more templates? Blogger Help

Related:
Tips for Blogs in Medical Education: How do I put a special section just for my students on my blog?
Tips for New Medical Bloggers: How to Get Noticed?
Image sources: public domain.