As we only have forum categories and the search it might be the right time to add some most viewed list or some rating or some tags … you know what I mean.

lots of ways to judge it. I suppose it will be in the end a mix of objective and subjective analysis.

Please have a look and tell what you think about tag clouds as a possible solution for that ‘drilling deeper’ problem.

The blogger in question is a tremendous, highly-acclaimed writer, but his blog navigation stinks because it doesn’t even have “recent posts”. He does, however, have a “related posts” list at the bottom of each post. (But there are only 5 links, so for older sites, it’s still hard to find older posts.)

This, I believe, is what Darren Rowse does. And Kim, it doesn’t take up much space. It doesn’t even live in the navigation sidebar. Alternately, you could write your new posts to refer to relevant older posts. Darren’s written about this technique several times.

But beyond the suggestions already made in this thread, I’m not sure anyone has come up with any other magical IA (Info Architecture) scheme in a small footprint to resuscitate older blog posts. That doesn’t mean someone won’t, of course

Ive been writing to a personal blog for a little while, as i feel the need to swear, and generally be much more negative and grumpy than i do at performancing heh…. and i’ve been playing around with some thoughts on navigation for this site.

My current thought is that tags work well for me, but i want a list a of title links, not title AND description, so i can zip though a tag/category page.

For really old content, i favor Search.

You could also try what Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger.net does; created linked pages on a specific topic (using a wordpress plugin – dont know which one but he mentions it on his site) and then posts a link to the first post of that series in his sidebar.

True and thank you for the helpful suggestion. However, my bigger concern is for blogs that are years old. The sidebar is often where revenue generating blogs want to put ads, not mess with archive workarounds that might take up good real estate.

Tags and categories, as well as topic pages are band-aids and do help, but if bloggers expect to be online making what amounts to thousands of posts, some with muliple themes, then archive workarounds and plug-ins may become a maintenance nuisance. I’m interested in space saving ideas that gel nicely within the overall IA of a blog, ease of use for everybody who wants it (not just techies), can handle growth ….

A couple of links are fine, half a dozen is not.

Let me clarify:

From a users point of view, outbound links to offsite, authorative sources indicate a knowledge of subject, and an authority on subject. I can write 10 articles about walrus tickling in timbucktoo and link them all together but it doesn’t make me an expert on the subject. Though if i link to a whole bunch of really useful articles and posts and discussion groups etc etc it not only provides value, but gives the user the (hopefully correct) impression that ive done my homework and know what im talking about.

From a Performancing administrators point of view its simply a hell of a lot easier to gage intent. If i spot 10 links to the authors blogs, all with exceptionally good anchor text, im more inclined to be suspicious of intent than if I see 10 links going out to authority pages on the subject. I’d also worry that once we start publishing posts with a ton a personal links in them, we encourage others to do likewise — where would it end?

On reprints

Actually we encourage it. And using PFF makes it very easy to do so. Same rules apply, if it’s homepage worthy it will go out there, if not it wont. Sometimes it depends on what else has gone out during the day but most well written on topic posts make the homepage.

Hope that clears things up from our point of view….

Thanks again for the smashing feedback!

Markus – pretty late at night – might have mistaken something

BTW, did you read my posts in this thread and what I was talking about

you guys seem to erring on the side of caution here. I figure that a couple of links are allowed, especially if they are very relevant to the discussion. Otherwise, if you’re referencing to 10 posts, that becomes excessive…

So I’d suggest to stop waiting for Nick and Chris and if you have 2-3 links to your blog posts, just put it up. They’ll stop you when they want to.

Kim – You could also try what Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger.net does; created linked pages on a specific topic (using a wordpress plugin – dont know which one but he mentions it on his site) and then posts a link to the first post of that series in his sidebar. That helps a lot in giving the archives some structure.

Instead of bashing the system, if you just take a minute and think about possible workarounds you can come up with quite a few useful solutions…

P.com reprints somewhere else: I did do some reprints of my p.com articles (i.e. a PFF critic) on one of my blogs and did some editing and added some links to p.com.

Let’s wait for a statement about the p.com politics I admit that it is sometimes pretty hard to write a nice article and to not link to already available relevant examples/information … Update: like in my comment above … I could easily have linked to my site to show Kim examples how I solved the archive problem but Id id not do it because of the guideline to not post self-promotional links.