Comments on: ProBlogger Archive Page – Up and Running

By: Gerard McGarry

Gerard McGarry — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 13:34:59 +0000

Darren – I liked the date-based archive you have. Just wondering if this was achieved with a plugin or was it manually crafted? Care to share the secret?

By: Jaseem

Jaseem — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 11:14:07 +0000

Bug in the archive page.
Two categories -31 days to..and advertising-shows same content. heading is ok but the posts and description are both exactly same

By: Asako

Asako — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 07:32:17 +0000

Thank you, Ozh!

By: Ozh

Ozh — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 12:32:54 +0000

A decent Archives page has always been my weak point in blog design. It’s pretty hard to make something useful both for readers and search engines.

Asako » I think the only use for time based archive is internal linking to make the search engines job easier indexing your site. Apart from this, I cannot think of any reason to use them, unless of course your blog has a time sensitive nature (news, covering some events, etc)

Darren » how are key posts picked in your key categories? Is it based on post views, number of comments, anything automatic, or did you hand pick them?

By: Nathan Chapman

Nathan Chapman — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 07:27:00 +0000

Nice Use for your archives
One thing though: is it maintained by hand or a plug-in?
Thanks

By: Asako

Asako — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 00:54:47 +0000

I still do not understand why date archive is important. I eliminated it from my blogs, but I am a Newbie, probably am missing something important.

How do people use the date archive, in making blog reading more effective?

Do you think I should bring it back?

By: Kelvin Kao

Kelvin Kao — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 23:39:25 +0000

I like this tweak. It works really well for a site with so many articles on them. It’s a non-issue for sites that don’t have that many posts, of course.

Hm, now I am considering making my side bar into a standard side bar / site map hybrid… when I have more materials to organize, that is.

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 22:27:03 +0000

Beth – the categories are static, although could be done dynamically by using categories to define which posts you want to display as “featured” in a specific category and running a loop to cycle through the categories.

The dates are displayed by using a plugin called Smart Archives.

By: Darren Rowse

Darren Rowse — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 22:10:32 +0000

Everton – yeah, I’ve never been satisified with date archives or category pages on any blog I’ve ever had. We were just talking about it last night – will keep tweaking.

By: beth

beth — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 15:25:21 +0000

I’d love to hear more about your experience creating these archives, what plugins you used if any, and discussion on WordPress archive tools in general.

By: Everton

Everton — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:51:37 +0000

I like the way the ‘by date’ section is laid out, but not what happens when you click on a link. I was expecting to get a list of post titles generated within the archives page that I could scroll through, not for a full page of excerpts to be generated.

Ditto with the categories archives – displaying just the titles would be great for fast browsing.

I use the ELA plugin to generate my archives page. It’s a bit slow to generate the first page view, but I think it’s effective

By: Brian Purkiss

Brian Purkiss — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 13:39:48 +0000

Congrats!
I’m going to go check that out now…