Archives de-mystified

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.