BlogHer - Simple Yearly Archive - Comments

with your organization. I looked at both examples and it's really easy to find a recipe for anything. If there was some way to automate the process you go through as a plug in, people would really snap it up.

One of the reasons I switched from Blogger to Wordpress was to get categories, which help. Tag clouds can help, too.

There are many alternatives to archives for getting found. I should have mentioned above that the archive I described in the post adds an additional link (with good link text when you're the queen of link text) to the search engine indexes.

http://www.webteacher.ws/
http://first50.wordpress.com/

I use Wordpress.com for my

kperfetto — Tue, 06 May 2008 09:33:10 -0500

I use Wordpress.com for my photoblog, so the options are somewhat limited, but they just installed a photoblog template, and one of the best things about it is the archives page. Instead of a list of dates, you get a calendar view with thumnails.

Available Light & Five Dollar Radio

Traditional Archive and Tags

Alanna Kellogg — Tue, 06 May 2008 09:20:03 -0500

... just don't work, in my opinion. Even "lists" are too long for helping readers to find what they want. Showing the entirety of all the posts (as many platforms do) is impossible to load and bad for generating pageviews too.

I build archive lists manually but do think that my archives are the very best organized in the food blog world -- I treat the recipes like a database, there are no "old posts". About 95% of my traffic comes from prior months.

I've become the queen of anchor text but creating such detailed ways to find recipes not only lets readers find exact recipes however they want but also lets me POINT readers to similar sorts of recipes.

Examples --

Recipe Box for A Veggie Venture

Recipe Box for Kitchen Parade

I think that the blogging platforms treat archive posts as throw-away content. The tag/archive and even search technologies are just far too limiting.

Alanna Kellogg
Kitchen Parade &
A Veggie Venture