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Simon Willison’s Weblog

Archive woes

Mike Golding has some interesting thoughts on Archive Navigation in blogs. He uses mine as an example of what not to do. I agree—the archives on this site leave an awful lot to be desired. I’ve got a few ideas to improve them (mostly inspired by Mark Pilgrim’s excellent calendar navigation) but I can’t really do anything until I’ve been through and added titles to every single entry :/

Posted 6th April 2003 at 10:40 pm

This is Archive woes by Simon Willison, posted on 6th April 2003.

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7 comments

  1. I'm getting around that problem by writing a function that grabs the first few words on any entry that doesn't have a title. It's not a perfect solution but it lets me go back and retro-title entries at my leisure. YMMV.

    FRC - 7th April 2003 01:14 - #

  2. Hey, got a link to Mike's comments?

    Keith - 7th April 2003 01:25 - #

  3. Erm.. I have now ;)

    Simon Willison - 7th April 2003 01:53 - #

  4. Very important archive navigation tip for people that Simon reads: put the date in huge blinking red letters, so that he'll realize when he's linking to something from several months ago. Somehow I missed Mike's post when it was new, but I didn't bother looking at the date now since you had freshly linked to it, and I had the hardest time figuring out why I was getting slammed for useless monthly archives when I'm using the big calendar with post titles (stolen from Mark) that everyone was speaking of so approvingly. Oh. I wasn't, last December.

    Phil Ringnalda - 7th April 2003 02:47 - #

  5. Yeah I noticed that after I posted it - I came across it in my referrals and forgot to check when it was written. Still interesting though.

    Simon Willison - 7th April 2003 11:15 - #

  6. Yes I wrote that back in Dec 2002, but most of the points still stand. It has spurned some thoughts on archive navigation which can only be a good thing. The biggest issue, I believe, is allowing the reader to get to the bottom of the page and giving them no way to move to the next entry/month. It usually means scrolling to the top of the page to find the archive link(s), at that point you need to find exactly where you were so you can continue where you left off, not easy. I have tried to address this as much as possible on my site, all I need now is some flashing red dates.

    Mike Golding - 7th April 2003 14:59 - #

  7. Absolutely, the bottom of the page is far too neglected: I remember pointing and gibbering the first time I saw someone putting the javascript include in their Blogger page twice to have one at the bottom (and then never did it myself). By far the most useful thing to me is the "10 more" link that you see at the bottom of a very few fried front pages. Calendars and categories? I use my own to find my own entries when I can't remember the right keywords, but other than "next month/previous month" links when I come into a permalink in someone's archives, I think archive navigation is more useful to Googlebot than it is to humans.

    Phil Ringnalda - 7th April 2003 15:24 - #

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