There is being an argument about blog archives on the part of Aquarion, Dorothea, Burningbird, and some other people. Some of the points being argued are:
- Weekly archives are good
- Weekly archives are bad
- Search function is good
- Archives listed in a sidebar are good
- Archives listed on a separate index page are good
- Having to click three or more times to get to the desired post is bad
Hmm.
I agree with some of that. For example, I agree with Dorothea that it's annoying to have to work through so much hierarchy just to get to an individual post. However, I disagree that her weekly-archives-inna-sidebar approach is really the way to go. As Jonathon Delacour asserts, weekly archives are an unnatural
(my word) unit of time; people are likely to remember the month but not the week in which they read a certain post. If I had thought about it much, that would be my reason for not providing weekly archives. (The real reason is that they weren't default, and my gut told me not to add them.)
On the other hand, I also agree with Burningbird that this discussion is being taken perhaps slightly too seriously. I don't mean that it shouldn't be discussed. After all, discussion is how people find out what other people think, especially since the discussion is taking place among people who read each other's blogs and use the archives on each other's sites. One thing my quarter-and-a-bit in library school has taught me is that it's important to talk to the users and to find out what they want. I also learned that any system which is geared towards some user group has to sacrifice individual needs to the average
user in that group. No system will fit everyone perfectly, but hopefully it'll fit almost everybody well enough.
With that in mind, the individualities of the blog have to be taken into consideration. Some blogs might be structured in such a way that a weekly archive might make sense. For example, I could imagine such a structure for the Diary of Samuel Pepys, which has a post for every single day; a weekly archive could highlight the weekday vs. weekend patterns. On the other hand, I am fairly certain that my blog would not work as a weekly archive. Although recently I have been verbose, I sometimes don't post for a few days, so some weekly archives would be very slim indeed.
As for my blog, the last 12 monthly archive pages as well as the archive index are linked from the main index. The archive index provides access to category, monthly, and the last 50 individual archives as well as a search form. I hope that this setup allows users access to the method they most prefer. I concede that my monthly archives may end up being rather long. I had 35 entries for the last two weeks of January alone; on the other hand, most of those entries were fairly short, and the pages will also be kept short if I can remember to use the Extended Entry more often on long posts like this one.