Till now, Blogger archives have been a mystery for many because they are difficult to browse through because of 2 reasons:
1. There are too many files (more so if you have weekly archives) which have to be viewed.
2. Each file takes a bit of time to download because of the complete posts and all the extra baggage.
Here's a tool that I have developed which you can use to view the archives for a whole year in one page. It will show the post titles, a text-only preview (first few lines) of each post and the permalink. You can use it with anybody's blog, not just yours. There's also some piece of code that you can add to your Blogger template to plug-in this tool for your blog just like I have done in my sidebar. This will encourage your visitors to browse your archives. Check out Archive Browser.
Here's the output of this tool for John and Greg's Freshblog for 2006.
Note:
* Since there's no feed for archives, this tool processes the html pages themselves.
* It works with any commonly used Blogger template that uses the CSS classes "post-title" and "post-body"
* It works with any third party template that uses the CSS classes "entry-header" and "entry-body"
* It works with some other CSS classes for body such as "bodyPost" but post title will not be shown.
7 comments:
Great tool. Have been considering some alternate uses: This would make a great backup tool, since the page containing a year's worth of archived goodies can be saved to your hard-drive, and stuff could then be cut & pasted back into your blog if required. On the same track, this might make a cool "publish your blog as a book" sort of tool.
Though if it only contains the first few lines of each post, that wouldn't help much for backup purposes. Would it be easy to make a full-post version?
Yes, Richard, it is possible. If you are using one of the templates from Blogger, we could make an eBook containing all the posts of an year. Do you like this idea?
Ramani,
The ebook idea is great one. I guess if you can combine your archive browser concept with ebook using a pdf creator, I guess that would work fine.
Thx.
Hey ramani there are two sides of this "hack"
There are people who blog daily, I mean lets say some one has over 200 blogs in one year, Then the page loading 200 blogs will take very long time to load.
I remember long ago I had landed on a page which gave a "hack" for archive by year, in this if u clicked on the year there would be a drop down Javascript in which we could chose the month which one could see.
This is already done by "Google blogsearch"
Try accessing the following link
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?as_q=thoughtsintamil&num=10&hl=en&c2coff=1&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_drrb=q&as_qdr=a&as_mind=1&as_minm=1&as_miny=2000&as_maxd=29&as_maxm=7&as_maxy=2006&lr=&safe=off&q=thoughtsintamil+blogurl:http://thoughtsintamil.blogspot.com&ie=UTF-8&scoring=d
Oneguy,
Yes, I know that. But many non-techie bloggers don't know this. So, I am providing an option to use google site search with their blog's archives. Let me update the intro page to reflect this. thanks.
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