The good old archives.
Posted on 13.09.2009 08:22 pm
I've added an archive on the right side of every blog related page. Currently it displays title, post time and vote info. I'm kinda exploring how a good archive page should be. Since there should always be a simple handy way to find the blog post in question.
You can not vote on the archive page and it will stay that way. Since voting should only be done when you're done reading an entry.
You can sort by date and votes and there will be a search function there soon and some sort of pagination.
A good archive section is a critical element in every system and I feel to many system out there do it wrong.
For example Wordpress's default archive setup. To show months (with no data on how much is in each month) and when you click on it you get the standard blog view where you have to scroll through each blog post.
It's certainly not fun to scan through.
If you have an example of a good archive system, post it in the comments. I'd love to hear from you guys on this.
1 3 Like it or hate it? - Comment (6)
Gummi Kári
0 1 / Posted on 14.09.2009 08:57 am
This sure sounds like a better idea than the WordPress one. I´ve lost count of how many times I curse this "feature"
Alex Rozanski
0 1 / Posted on 15.09.2009 12:58 pm
Nice system – I definitely think it's better than the Wordpress one as it only shows the minimal – yet useful – amount of information to identify the posts, which makes browsing much easier. Although I have a couple of suggestions:1. Perhaps you could have a favourite posts list underneath or integrated with the archives on the side bar – I've seen lots of blogs do this and I think it's a great way to list your best posts – of course you'd have to define what "best" is, whether it be net votes or pageviews or a combination thereof or whatever.
2. This second suggestion is of course, down to opinion, but I actually quite like the way you can categorise posts on Wordpress, since each of my posts are focused around slightly different topics – although this can get a bit messy if you have lots of categories, it can help readers who are interested in generic topics when browsing through the archives. Although if you're trying to keep the engine as minimal as possible I can see why this wouldn't be desirable.
Ólafur Waage
0 1 / Posted on 15.09.2009 06:12 pm
Categories or Tags is actually a subject I wanted to explore soon. Figure out it's pros and cons etc.My gut reaction is to implement a simple tagging feature, not a category feature. But how the user would go by tagging is still undecided.
Regarding the "best of" list, it's something easily implemented. Since the code for a list like that is behind the Recent posts feature. So you might see something like that soon.
Gísli
0 1 / Posted on 18.09.2009 10:18 pm
I'm liking this archive. I think this is more effective than showing the whole blog. But this means that the titles must be good.
Ólafur Waage
0 0 / Posted on 19.09.2009 12:07 am
Aye. Any blog with titles that are non descriptive or to long are doomed to fail anyway :P
Gísli
0 1 / Posted on 19.09.2009 12:41 am
Exactly, one thing that I'm missing is the comments count in the blog. I think that the commenting would look more alive with that and could be more active.Process time: 0.010574 seconds
