Building a Useful Archive

When blog sites became commonplace they usually featured an archive of articles sorted by date. Often that meant a monthly archive in a sidebar, or on a dedicated page. Nearly a decade has passed and I still find this sort of date-based archives on a majority of sites. I never understood their value. Who ever says I need to find that article published in March last year? That’s just not how the human mind works.

I wonder why these types of archives ever became popular and I conclude it was because they are simple to compute and therefore easy to build for software developers. I blame Six Apart, with their Movable Type. They set the standard. Textpattern is the only CMS I’m aware of that lacks the date-based archive as a default. Dean Allen knew early on they were crap.

Archives sorted by categories, or in recent years tags, are only marginally better. Tag clouds are useful when you want an overview of the topics on a site. They’re useful when you want to see everything written on each of those topics. However, they are generally not what I use then I try to find something.

In my experience there are two general ways of looking for information: browsing and searching.

When I sort of know what I’m looking for, I browse. A typical example would be flipping through a book or magazine, looking for a passage I’ve read earlier. I may not know exactly where it is but I’m confident I’ll recognize it when I see it. On the other hand, when I try to find new information, a passage or article I haven’t actually seen before, I search. I then don’t have to recognize what I’m looking for by sight. I only need to be able to specify an appropriate search query.

Browse and search. This is what I think a useful archive should supply.

In this incarnation of Swedish Pixels I’ve tried to remove clutter and build an archive that makes sense. That meant getting rid of a dedicated archive page altogether. There no longer is a distinction between the front page and the archive. The front page is a part of the archive–the first page of the archive, actually. While the first page is rendered in full text, the rest are shown as excerpts.

So, try to browse or search this site and let me know what you think.