Ways to Get Your Readers Caught Up

My post about a "Catch Up" button got a few comments suggesting other ways new readers of a blog fiction to catch up on past story. I thought that the ideas were important enough to pull out of the comments and into a blog post.

Catch Up label
This was already discussed.

Character Guides
One way of getting your readers up to speed is to have a page of character descriptions. That way, with every scene readers can click over to learn about a character mentioned in the latest post. That way someone new to the story can jump right in and know who everyone is.
See Melly Mills, or The User Pool for examples.

Plot Summary in sidebar
A lot of people will put a summary of what's going on in the sidebar. The description would be something akin to the back cover of a book. Just a little intro so that reader's aren't completely lost.
Just a few examples: Wilf's World, Horton's Folly, Charlotte.

Plot Summary in separate page.
This is something that I haven't seen used in practice. I'm not sure why. It would seem to be very effective. Every time something significant happens a writer could just add a line to the summary page so that a reader can get up to speed quickly and directly.

Constant Link Back to previous events
This strategy of keeping your readers up to speed is something unique to the blog format. A mention of a story or character could have a link back to an old post about that story or introduction of that character. For readers who are constantly up to date, they can just read right over the text. For those who haven't read every word you've ever written still have a chance to get up to speed with the plot. A log of different sites use this, just a few examples are:
The User Pool, Terran Resistance, and Death's Blog used it.

Change Your writing style
This is something that Odin Soli pointed out when talking about the "catch up" button. When you're writing a serial, you must always keep that in mind and your writing should reflect it.

Episodic scriptwriting is full of tricks for mid-streaming viewers, since TV shows and other serials deal with this problem all the time. Something we did in a journalism class once -- watch a soap opera episode, then write down as much backstory as we could. It was amazing to discover how much we'd learned about the setting, characters, conflicts, etc. from a single episode.

The point is, if you write something correctly your reader's won't have to spend much time catching up.

I've listed all the methods I've seen and can think of for getting reader's of a blog fiction "caught up", but which way is the best? I don't know the answer to that. I don't even know if there is an answer to that. I think that they all work. I haven't seen enough examples of any of them to say that one is better than the other. Also, there is no reason a writer can't use more than one or all of these strategies to get new readers up to speed. For now, I would say use whichever strategy makes sense to you to get your new readers up to speed. Just make sure that you have a strategy.