Blog Archives force Pogosticking
January 26th, 2006
There’s an interesting post by Jon Boutelle about organizing blog archives by month and how that forces users to pogostick through the gallery to find anything beyond what’s available on the home page.
It begs the question: Who is going to write the faceted browsing plug-in for Word Press and the other blogging platforms?
February 5th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
[...] Also, Jonathan Boutelle has a good point on archive pogosticking (via Jared Spool): One of the prototypical features of any blog is a monthly archive. This is typically a link on the sidebar for each month since the blog went live, and usually looks something like this: [...]
February 5th, 2006 at 3:13 pm
I guess the monthly archives, whether presented as a calender with number of posts per day or not, is just one of those blog features that’s been around from the beginning, but is fairly unusable.
But even if you have to click back to a single page of headlines to go to another article, as Jonathan suggests, isn’t that still ‘pogosticking’? And is pogosticking really so bad if it’s applied to an article browsing environment? I thought the big problem with pogosticking was in comparing items (such as in online stores), where the user needs to be able to find enough information on the gallery page to know which one to click for details. It seems to me that in the case of the average blog, just mentioning the headlines seems to accomplish that well enough.