2013/Hollywood/Pagination

This page is an archive of a IndieWebCamp Hollywood 2013 session.

See pagination for latest thoughts

How best to handle pagination?



Page 1, 2, 3...
Major problems with /page/1 /page/2 URLs. The content of /page/2 changes over time, search engines index the pages and the content changes underneath over time.

Posts before X
Fixed-content pagination URLs. This is the approach aaronpk takes, for example http://aaronparecki.com/notes?before=2013-09-26-1. The contents of that URL are fixed because it's tied to a specific post rather than a page number.

Human-centric pagination
How to maintain the spatial recognition for your readers? e.g. "I've already read this page so I can stop paging back now". Like reading books where you remember you read a sentence in the bottom right corner of the page so you skim through the pages looking for the sentence in that corner.

Maybe the solution is to have increasing page numbers rather than decreasing? In this model, you would basically be "filling up" a page as you create posts, like writing on a physical page. You start writing on your site at page 1 being your oldest content. As you write more notes you fill up page 1, then create a new page. Your home page becomes a pointer to the highest number page in your system. This is more like writing in a physical journal. The contents of page 2 never changes after it's written. This is a property of physical media that hasn't been carried over to the digital world yet.