An estimate 90% of the blogs follow the same layout: A header, a content area, a sidebar – either on the left or the right side – and a footer. Of course, this helps in navigating through this 90% of the blogs, as they are very similar. These also applies for the content provided through the sidebar: There’s a option to search, category listings, links, sometimes a tagcloud and so on… oh, and the archives of course.
I guess the current formatting of this archive list in a monthly way comes through WordPress with it’s standard theme Kubrick, which has this option per default enabled. People install WordPress, they see this archive listing, they think it’s important to have this as well. These archives are listed in a monthly type, so you can have rough indication of how long this blog is already present. But is it useful for any other purpose? I mean, as a visitor you have no clue whatsoever what postings were made in all these months. In order to find them, you have to look through them. Not found? On to the next month…for what? Not to mention that it really clutters up the sidebar – a blog living for 2 years will have 24 entries just for this archives!
If you’re looking for a specific posting, you would search for it by either providing the name in the search field or having a look in the appropriate category. No one would search for this posting by browsing through these monthly archives. Especially not on sites with different topics.
I prefer the method of having a master archive, which means having all posts ever made sorted in a chronological way, presenting at least the title, maybe a small excerpt. With this, people can use the builtin search-function of their browsers to search for the posting they want to have. Blix is a theme for WordPress which already implemented it this way. No sidebar cluttering, just one page with all postings. Of course, this won’t work for all blog types (imagine BoingBoing with a master archive, the page would take hours to load…), but if it’s just 1 or 2 postings a day, it works really well.
So, what do you think? Is the traditional monthly archive list in the sidebar really useless? Are you using them on blogs than your own?
Interesting points you are listing here. As you see on my website I do not prefer a monthly archives listing in the main page because users are not really interested in old articles, are they?
But if they are, they should have a possibility to browse on a archives-page and in my opinion you should show the writings you wrote in your “bloggin-career”. I prefer a monthly schedule and underneath the article topics and a date – maybe the commentary too.
And if you are slick in AJAX, offer a live browsing archive – it saves space and represents a more structured archiving-system.
ps: I hope you can understand my “noob” english :)
regards
If the archives get large I think the AJAX way is the best way to go. As long as they’re not more than max. say 300-400 posts one could still have some chronological overview with only the post titles.
On my own blog it happens quite often that I’m looking for a certain post because I want to show it to someone. In this case the AJAX livesearch works like a charm for me.