The last couple nights I’ve gotten a few hours of sleep as I’ve been buried in WordPress, PHP, Plugins, and JavaScript building a new theme for WordPress for a company and then trying to get my Archives back up. I’m also helping another company launch a new online Mashup (I just did a couple graphics, he did a really cool mashup that you’ll hear about very soon!)
With regard to my archive page, apparently I’ve modified my theme so far out that it’s no longer functioning as originally designed with the Squible beta theme. I have no idea when I did it, but it’s been down for a few weeks now. (Psst… hey Squible guys… please launch something soon… you’ve been beta forever!)
I tried out a plethora of WordPress plugins for the archives. Some of them were pretty fascinating, like the Simile timeline plugin. I had it up and running last night but figured out that it post-loaded ALL of the posts in one fatal swoop. Argh.
I have over 300 posts on this site so that would build a monster file request for every person that visited. I modified the code quite a bit to build a caching mechanism. That eliminated all the database hits but it was still too much to handle to load for each subscriber. Ideally, the plugin should utilize a mechanism using the Simile API to go retrieve the events as the timeline is moved. I’ll wait on that one!
The other issue with the Simile timeline plugin and many of the other plugins I found were that the events were dynamically loaded using JavaScript/Ajax. This is a terrible way of building an archive for your blog because the search engine crawlers will hit a dead-end.
As a result, I think I’m going to build my own. I’m toying with some ideas on how right now… possibly a nice tree type action from year, to month, to post. We’ll see. I’m doing a lot of theme work for another project this weekend so I’ll get back to this.
Meanwhile, my site may be lacking some hits as the archives aren’t getting crawled. We’ll get those hits back, though! Please stand by.
I did actually install that one as well. I’m trying to get something that’s a little more comprehensive… take a look at http://binarybonsai.com/archives/
He’s done a nice implementation and uses css and javascript to hide and display his data. It’s all actually present in the HTML so it will be crawled.
It’s pretty cool.