How Do You Like Your Wordpress Archives?

I don't find blog archives that list posts by dates—either weekly or monthly—very helpful. Unless you're trolling through rereading everything in a stroll down memory lane, seeing archives by date doesn't provide much information.

I found a Wordpress plugin called Simple Yearly Archive. It lists a link to every single blog post by title, organized by year. It's made by Oliver Schlöbe and is free. (If you see German rather than English when you click the link, look for a little flag icon to find the English version.)

You can see a demo on schloebe.de. It's in German, but you'll get the idea. I use it on Web Teacher. Before I give you the link to check it on Web Teacher, I must warn you that I've been blogging on Web Teacher for about 7 years, and I have hundreds of posts. So it takes this plugin about 30 seconds to build a list of every post title for the archives. Wait for it: Web Teacher Archives. This long wait for my very large archves is a drawback. If your archives are smaller, it will be faster.

I find the list of post titles as an archive much more helpful. You can skim down the list of links looking for keywords or a particular topic and quickly find something you might be interested in. Much less hit or miss than going through archives by date only. Plus, you can gather a clear idea as to what a particular blog is really about by looking at actual post titles.

I know you are about to say, "But I just use the search to find what I want." That's swell, keep using search. This isn't about search. It's about archives.

Download it from Oliver Schlöbe. The instructions for installing it in your plugin directory are on his site. Once you've installed it, activate it. Create a new Page in Wordpress called Archives and type only the HTML-style comment that says --simple yearly archive-- on the page. (Do it exactly as it's shown in the installation instructions, I had to fudge a bit to get the comment to show up here, so don't copy my example.) That's it. You've got a simple yearly archive.

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Submitted by Virginia DeBolt (view blog

) on Tue, 05/06/2008 - 08:05

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Traditional Archive and Tags

... just don't work, in my opinion. Even "lists" are too long for helping readers to find what they want. Showing the entirety of all the posts (as many platforms do) is impossible to load and bad for generating pageviews too.

I build archive lists manually but do think that my archives are the very best organized in the food blog world -- I treat the recipes like a database, there are no "old posts". About 95% of my traffic comes from prior months.

I've become the queen of anchor text but creating such detailed ways to find recipes not only lets readers find exact recipes however they want but also lets me POINT readers to similar sorts of recipes.

Examples --

Recipe Box for A Veggie Venture

Recipe Box for Kitchen Parade

I think that the blogging platforms treat archive posts as throw-away content. The tag/archive and even search technologies are just far too limiting.

Alanna Kellogg
Kitchen Parade &
A Veggie Venture

Submitted by Alanna Kellogg on Tue, 05/06/2008 - 08:20

Wow, I'm impressed

with your organization. I looked at both examples and it's really easy to find a recipe for anything. If there was some way to automate the process you go through as a plug in, people would really snap it up.

One of the reasons I switched from Blogger to Wordpress was to get categories, which help. Tag clouds can help, too.

There are many alternatives to archives for getting found. I should have mentioned above that the archive I described in the post adds an additional link (with good link text when you're the queen of link text) to the search engine indexes.

http://www.webteacher.ws/
http://first50.wordpress.com/

Submitted by Virginia DeBolt on Tue, 05/06/2008 - 10:04

I use Wordpress.com for my

I use Wordpress.com for my photoblog, so the options are somewhat limited, but they just installed a photoblog template, and one of the best things about it is the archives page. Instead of a list of dates, you get a calendar view with thumnails.

Available Light & Five Dollar Radio

Submitted by kperfetto on Tue, 05/06/2008 - 08:33