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By Jacob Cohen | January 31, 2007
Why is it that blog software always organizes entries by month? Is this really a useful way to find posts in an archive? Often I find myself browsing through the archives of a blog I’ve stumbled upon, such as User Centered, a blog about usability. However, this blog, like so many others, offers the archive organized by the month in which the post was made. I don’t really care about that, I’d rather have an easy way to go back through the archives, viewing older and older posts, until I’ve either read them all or they have lost enough relevance for me to stop.
I think the organizational system used by web comics tends to be much easier to use. When you come across the site for the first time, you often want to read the archives to get caught up to the current entry. They almost always provide navigation that makes this easy. There is typically a “First entry” link that goes exactly where you would expect. From there, you can just keep hitting “Next entry” until you’ve caught up.
For entries that happen chronologically, like blog entries and web comics, it makes a great deal of sense to have the entries organized continuously, with the Next and Previous navigation elements always available. Browsing by month is only useful if you want to find a specific entry and happen to know when it was made (though I think offering the ability to search the entries is arguably more useful than browsing by month).
I just find it strange that sites that promote usability and user-centered design, such as User Centered and This is Broken force me to select a month to see posts in the archive.
Topics: Design |
