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Jonathan takes Dorathea to task for taking Mark to task for Mark’s archive system.

Seeming as how my archive system works much like Mark’s, only (From Dorathea’s POV) worse because you have to choose a year as well as everything else (It’s still three clicks, because my monthly archives are full posts, but even so…), I should be on the defensive. First, I agree whole-heartedly with Jonathan on the subject of weekly archives. I once offered them (Via a kludge of Klind’s select date-range feature, which I have yet to find a nice interface for in [E]2), but because I didn’t find them terribly useful, I dropped them. The unit of archiving for this weblog is the Month and the Post, weeks make life confusing.

The benifits of the Tiered structure are, for me, three-fold. The first is sheer weight of numbers. I’ve been blogging for three years now, posting once every day, with occasional holidays. I have archives going back to January 2000, Even a list of *months* is getting on for forty lines in a navigation box, weeks would be… what, about a hundred and fifty lines? Sod that. I don’t object to long pages (See the category page for “Personal”. Since everything before august last year got filed there it’s about half a meg of HTML), but I don’t want to overload the front page.

The second is logical structure. If you’re looking for a post by when I posted it, you’ll probably have a rough idea which month it appeared in, and what year. You probably don’t want to wade though another thirty calendar tables, All large navigation is drill-down out of necessity of not fusing the average users tiny minds with too much information. Again, weeks fall down here because they are a halfway house between the openness of a month and the claustophobia of archive by day. If you want a post by category, use the archive by category instead of by date. Bada-bing, as I’m assured they say in the states.

I agree that three clicks to the current archive is a little overboard, and my solution to this (as of today) is to display the current year archive on the front page of the Archive section, or I could to put a “Last six months” list after the Recent Comments down the left. Putting the whole archive on the front page, though, strikes me as overkill at this size.

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