Indexing Your Archives

Tim Bray and Anil Dash are exploring compact indexes for their weblog archives. Bray calls this a Dash View, which is a great name — we should name things more often for people. I'm a little miffed, I guess, because I've been using this kind of view for years, both in the right sidebar (for Book archives) and the footer (for weblog archives).

This is a live example, transcluded from the current navigation footer. Someday, no doubt, the navigation scheme will change; someone will have a great new idea, I'll implement it, and this weblog post will have a broken or incorrect example. For now, though, it's a nice specimen of experimental information archicture.

Dash View has a certain ring to it. We could call it a dash board.

Chronological access is literally geeky: we're exploring it because we can, not because it's useful. It's far more useful to provide good topical access, and still better to link things together. But if dates are what you have, then it's better to represent and use the dates than to treat your archives as fish wrap.