I think your idea of a link to the next entry along with a link to the beginning of the project sure makes sense . These two together should be a reasonable solution. Heck, a link to a table of contents could also be useful.

Now, if only the blogging software could do all that for us automatically.

I like very much your table of contents as a structure for the project, and I’ve thought of doing something similar, though it would be longer and somewhat redundant with the archives. But it could be more nicely presented that way, and allow a little annotation. I think your stories would be easier to follow along if each chapter had, at the bottom, a clickable link to the next, so one wouldn’t have to return to the contents each time. That would essentially give the effect of a dedicated blog for each story.

As for chronological order, it’s certainly true that this project develops through time, though less linearly than your deer or robin stories. New readers might want to start at the beginning (!?) and step along, and that could be suggested with an explicit link to the first post. But I do believe it’s important to have the front page be the latest installment, whether or not there are regular readers. As it is, my project is more like a journal, so I think the familiar blog format basically fits. However, I’m actually in the process of redesigning it to be somewhat more book-like and less blog-like. I’d appreciate your thoughts when I roll it out, probably in the next couple weeks.

I bounced in here intentionally from some of your other writings on the net.

I like your approach here and want to follow along.

As you know blogs are structured for reverse chronological order.

I think this project of yours would benefit from some form of chronological presentation.

I don’t really have a good solution, but did take a crack at making compendium pages on my own blog that might serve as an example of a temporary solution.

You can check one out here….
http://rvewong.wordpress.com/storys/scene-of-the-crime-intro/

This project follows the lives of whitetail deer near my home in spring.