Archives are for egos
20080205509
When I redesigned this site ten months I didn’t bother to redo the archive page. Site stats indicated that much like search I was the only one that every used it. So why bother? I dropped any link to it but left the URL intact for my own use – and those who may have bothered to check or ever knew it once existed. Needless to say, that was very few. Sometimes seeing that old design was comforting.
Lately I’ve been into the canvas element. A scriptable tag is just too good to resist. In researching it I came across a library built on jQuery designed to created charts using the element. Charts and jQuery are also too good to resists.
The new archive
A bit of mess with Flot and WordPress and the new archive page was created. While it was an interest in learning how to use the canvas element that started this whole thing, it ended up being more an exercise in pulling data from WordPress. Much of it was intact from the previous archive page and plugins I had created, but not necessarily in a format easily passed to JS object literals. To be clear, all the pretty lines and canvas scripting are courtesy of flot – I merely dumped formatted data into it.
In addition to being an archive, those short title- and page-less posts now have semi-permalinks. Whether they’ll make it through a redesign remains to be seen. Whether a redesign ever happens also remains to be seen.
The new obsession
It’s not quite right yet. There are formatting issues. There are usability issues. There are consistency issues (Dates in multiple formats? Gross!). There are performance issues. There is no Flickr. There is no place for those old photos slide from way back. Maybe some of that stuff will get fixed. Maybe I won’t ever think about anything but the archives. Maybe I’ll just look at the lines every day.
Which is the neat part. And the part that shows when I’m slacking at keeping this site fresh. Or shows when I write something that others find interesting. I once again support archives on blogs.
Comments
Skateboards and bikes are better at nights. 0 comments.
So basically what you’re saying is that I have to build a new archive page. Great.