archive

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archive in the context of the indieweb refers to date-grouped (often monthly) sets of posts (AKA personal historical archives, a common form of temporal navigation), but can sometimes mean archival copy, a copy of a web page made (often by someone other than the author) at a particular point in time.

For an archive of an entire site,

For “the Archive”,

Why

Providing access to archives helps people browse your past content.

How to

There are many approaches to providing archive navigation UI.

Typically people provide links to specific months and years, sometimes in a list of links, sometimes in a list of years that expend to months, and then only the month links actually navigate you to archives for those months.

IndieWeb Examples

Tantek

Tantek Çelik uses Falcon to serve composite archive pages (unlinked) on tantek.com for each day since 2010, e.g.:

And before that, all his blog posts were written and served directly from archive pages by Gregorian month, from 2002-08-08 to 2008-08-08

Ryan Barrett

Ryan Barrett uses WordPress to serve an archive index and archives on snarfed.org for posts since 2003-06-29:

Aaron Parecki

Aaron Parecki uses p3k to serve composite archive pages on aaronparecki.com since 2014-10-05, e.g.:

There is also a monthly view which renders a calendar month in a table, and includes icons for each post, as well as a list of all the hashtags and locations from that day.

cweiske

Christian Weiske has an archive subdomain with a couple of hand-picked pages that disappeared - http://archive.cweiske.de/

gRegor Morrill

gRegor Morrill has an archive page at http://gregorlove.com/archives/ since 2011-02-14 [1]. It is inspired by Tumblr's archive page.

Shane Becker

Shane Becker uses Dark Matter to serve composite and post type specific archive pages (unlinked) on http://veganstraightedge.com (with pagination) since 2014-10-07, e.g.:

Ben Roberts

Ben Roberts uses Postly to serve composite archives in either monthly (linked - /YYYY/MM) or daily (unlinked - /YYYY/MM/DD) format since 2014-10-07.

Rachel Andrew

Rachel Andrew publishes an archive view with a few different tiers of visual hierarchy of past blog posts. At the top is a primary article with a background image and post name and subtitle. Next is 6 posts with colored backgrounds instead of photos, and one or two sentences in addition to the post name. Lastly are 8 more articles visually smaller and with shorter summaries.

Jamie Tanna

  Jamie Tanna has an archive page at https://www.jvt.me/archives/ which lists all posts, split by the year they were published.

Jonathan LaCour

Jonathan LaCour has an archive page at https://cleverdevil.io/archive since 3/6/2018. The archive page shows content grouped by year and month, with options to view content within a particular month, or on a specific day via a link. Each year is displayed as a horizontal timeline with a pleasing gradient:

Eddie Hinkle

Eddie Hinkle has several different types of archive pages.

  • Eddie has an article archive page since 11/02/2018. It groups articles by month and year, displaying the article titles and the day they were posted.

  • Eddie has daily archive pages that attempts to group similar information into common categories and display data appropriately for it's purpose. (Watch, Listen and Photo posts just display images that link back to their original post, Ate and Drank posts get gathered together into meals, etc).
  • monthly archive pages are currently just a stream of posts that looks just like a channel or tag page, but it shows posts that happened in that month. I would like to expand this to be more like the daily archive pages.


Jay Funabashi

j4y_funabashi

fluffy

fluffy has a very flexible set of archive pages, which is core to Publ's design.

All indexes are browseable by date and by offset-based pagination. Most pages on beesbuzz.biz use offset pagination by default (and don't provide UX for switching to date-based), but the comics section provides an easy means of switching between individual, daily, weekly, and monthly archives, and the Inktober section defaults to year-based pagination. (See also the Novembeat works page, which runs on the same website platform.)

This also extends to the Atom feeds, which provide RFC5005 archive tags to allow for a complete content index via Atom.

David Shanske

David Shanske uses the built-in WordPress functionality to generate date based, taxonomy based, and post kind/type based archives. He has extended this to include an archive for:

  • on_this_day
  • Date Based Archives for Post Kinds
  • Adding /map to many archives will redisplay all posts with a location and show a map.
  • Pairing a category and a kind... all posts of this type with this tag

Brainstorming

Order

Recently, David Shanske contemplated the way posts in an archive should be ordered. Traditionally, h-entry content has been ordered newest to oldest. But, for date-based archives, it may make sense to order them from oldest to newest, as a date based archive is a form of narrative where the posts should go chronologically.

Tantek archive thoughts

Tantek Çelik: See: Falcon#archives for some of my ideas and thoughts on how I want to enhance and improve my archive pages.

See Also

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