Archive organization
A weird problem I’m having with Phoenix lately underscores the desirability of easy-access blog archives.
For some reason, Phoenix is over-relying on cached copies of some blogs. (Yes, tried clearing cache; thank you come again.) Sometimes I can override it by going to the full blog URL instead of the index to whatever directory the blog lives in (e.g. http://yarinareth.net/caveatlector/index.html instead of http://yarinareth.net/caveatlector/).
Sometimes I can’t, and the only way I can read the latest posts is by hitting the archives. (Seems to happen to Blogspot blogs a lot; dunno why.)
I’m gonna pick on Mark here, ’cuz he won’t up and kill me. To get to a particular post in Mark’s archive, I have to click three times: once on the Archives link on the main page, once on the month link, and once on the post I want to read in Mark’s calendar view. (Clicking on a day in Mark’s calendar view only gives me excerpts, not full posts.)
Whereas to read the latest archives on my blog, one need only click the appropriate link in my sidebar.
Not only is Mark’s indirection an annoyance, it’s a waste of expensive bandwidth—diveintomark.org has to serve me up two pages I don’t want so that I can get to the page I do want. I’ll lay odds Mark wastes more bandwidth on these intermediate pages than I do by using weekly archives instead of individual-post archives—though, I hasten to say, there is no way to test this assertion because I don’t even have individual-post archives.
Maybe it’s that I read too damn fast, but individual-post archives never fail to annoy me. When I’m trying to catch up on a blog, as for example after my trip to Indiana a while back, I hate having to click on individual post links. Hate it hate it hate it. Larger date-based chunks, please.
Am I all alone here, or does this irk anyone else?