Are blog archives a waste of space? I only ask because I've noticed that my archives now stretch to 50 months, 50 pages, and I wonder how many of these ever get read.
The key thing about blogs is their immediacy. When you write a new post it always appears at the very top of your front page, in a position of due prominence, where it gains your readers' full attention. People see what you have to say while it's still relevant, in the here and now, maybe even generating sufficient online momentum for a lengthy debate to materialise. Reverse chronological ordering is the perfect online format for the discussion of today's touchstone issues. Everything you write on a blog will always be read by your regular readers, at least until you write something else.
And then each post starts slipping down the front page. It only takes one new post for the second post to be overlooked, especially if it now appears off the bottom of the reader's computer screen. Few people can be bothered to scroll down to check whether there's anything they've not read, so fresh comments dry up and interaction ceases. Slowly each post sinks further and further down into obscurity, still on your blog's front page but increasingly ignored. All that effort you put into writing the post is suddenly wasted, because nobody's reading it any more.
And then, after a set length of time (which on my blog is 2 weeks), the post vanishes completely from the front page into the archives. In this netherworld it lives out a miserable existence, unseen and wholly unloved. New readers to your blog may never notice it, never read it, even if it's an absolutely fantastic piece of writing. They're too busy reading whatever's at the top of your front page - the post you want them to read today. And yes, I know that some people trawl back through blog archives occasionally, but they're very much in the minority. For most internet users, out of sight is out of mind.
I choose to maintain monthly archives on my blog. I want my back catalogue to remain as accessible as possible, and this means dividing it up into large but manageable chunks. I could have plumped for weekly archives instead, except there'd be more than 200 of those by now and nobody would ever plough through them. Or I could have done what many people advise and set up individual post pages. No distractions, no surrounding clutter, just a single post on a single page. But I hate individual post pages. I much prefer to read posts in context, not in isolation. Individual archive pages destroy the flow of a blog and hide its character. Whatever bloggers might hope, nobody clicks repeatedly on "next post" links on individual post pages because they have no incentive to look, and in this way brilliant writing can disappear without trace.
I apologise for maintaining monthly archives on my blog. Monthly archives act as honeytraps for search engines, attracting punters in search of information that isn't there. I may never have written a post about "negative numbers before the 14th century" or "castro hat in hillingdon", but I have used all those words within a single month and so search engines mistakenly believe I've written something relevant. Yah, suckers. But poor misguided suckers, who may have invested considerable time trawling though 30 days of my ramblings only to find nothing of any relevance.
And I apologise for writing quite so much today about blog archives. In doing so I've knocked yesterday's post so far down the page that, if you didn't read it yesterday, you'll probably never bother. As for Saturday's offering, its time has passed, and last week's posts are already on a one-way ticket to oblivion. My 50 monthly archives therefore remain merely as a repository of reading material for search engine stragglers and the terminally bored. The immediacy of blogging damns 99% of all blog content to online irrelevance. And that last sentence will remain true long after anyone is still reading it.
