Reading blog archives is an incredible chore:
There are 21 problems with this approach:
It makes me ask for more content. When I’m done reading your blog, I’ll leave. If I’m still around after getting to the bottom of a page, obviously I want more content — don’t make me click somewhere to get it!
Content is split into arbitrary chunks along a dimension that I don’t care about: time. I have to choose between reading posts from May 2006 and June 2006, but I don’t care — I just want to get to the most interesting content, whatever month it’s in.
2 deserves a bit more discussion. Every blog and RSS Reader presents data sorted along the same lousy dimension: time. This doesn’t make sense. The top post on a blog should be the most interesting one, and only rarely (e.g., in the case of blogs that track bargains) will the most interesting post be the most recent.
It’s even worse for blog archives: obviously if I’m going through your archives I don’t care about the order of the posts. What difference could a month possibly make 2 years later?
So how should blogs and RSS readers work? First of all, the user should be able to access every post on the blog without clicking anything. Rather than breaking up the blog into chunks by date, every post should be on a single page sorted by relevance.
How do we fit a whole blog onto a single page? We start by taking real estate away from less relevant posts. Only the top-most (/ most relevant) posts should have their full content on the blog’s main page. As you scroll down though, you should get smaller and smaller excerpts from posts until you only see post titles. Clicking on any part of an excerpt should fill in the full content (inline preferably).
If the page is still too big, you could split the list up into several pages, and automatically advance pages when the user reaches the bottom of one.
So what sort order do you use? Well, first you need a metric for gauging quality. I don’t have all the answers, but it doesn’t take much to improve on the status quo. Potential things you could take into account: comments, links from other websites, diggs, numbers of times it’s shared via other websites (facebook, etc), traffic relative to other posts.
If you have the ability to mark a post read (as you do in an RSS reader), then we’re done. Just order the posts by quality, removing posts they get read.
If you don’t have the ability to mark a post as read (as is the case with blog websites), things are a little trickier. In this case you have to put at least some of the recent posts at the top, otherwise you’re going to annoy your frequent visitors.
Scroll down a bit though, and quality should begin to have an effect on a post’s ranking in the list. Scroll down more and quality becomes the only factor. At the top of the blog you have a link for new users to click that will quickly scroll past the new posts.
1 Is there any justification for spelling out the names of small numbers rather than using numerals? Numerals take up less space and are easier to read.