Segmenting your blog-journey by date

Update: This report is largely obsolete. Online stuff changes from time to time, and for this topic a revision would be impractical.

Read more about archived posts, if you like.

Especially if you have many posts in your feed, you might want to break your blog journey into chunks by date.

You could, for instance, have each year of posts on a separate page, or break up the flow by month or year. "May" followed by "June," etc.

You may also discover--as I did, when I switched from the Short feed to the longer Jump-Break feed--that your blog-journey is cut short.

Apparently, there is a limit to the size of feeds that feed2js.org will run. So chopping your feed into time periods lets you get around that problem, if you want your blog journey to be complete.

There's a bit more about that issue in this post, which I will revise as I learn more.

In the mean time, note that my Full-and-Jump-Break pipe now has start and end date fields.

If you just want one blog-journey script for your whole blog, you can pick a start date earlier than that of your blog's first post, and an end date in the far future.

However, if you want to segment your blog-journey into periods, use the date to specify the first period, then insert it into a static page. Repeat as needed for subsequent periods.

The pipe is forgiving about format for these dates. You can write "March 15 2009" or "2/15/2009" and it will understand you. Note however that the dates follow North American convention and go Month-Day-Year, not Day-Month-Year.

I have fully implemented this on the blog-journey page of my other blog, where I have more than 200 posts. It uses a Jump-Shift feed, is formatted, and is segmented by year.

You can put segments on separate pages or on the same static page. If you opt for multiple pages, consider putting "next" and "previous" links in the appropriate places, to help your readers get about.