Archived blog pages: two flavors

Photo: Peter Häger

There are two kind of archived blog pages, functionally similar enough that I described them together.

There are relative archive pages, reached by clicking the "Older Posts" or "More posts" link at the end of a page.

There are absolute archive posts, reached by clicking a month or week or year in the archive gadget (if installed in the sidebar).

Here's how these similar pages differ.

Archived blog pages

Photo: patriciojorge70

In the beginning was the blog, composed of posts.

Add enough content (and it does not take much), and your posts will overflow off the main blog page and into the archive.

Click "older posts" after the last post on your page to see the next-recent batch of posts. Your readers can navigate all of your content this way, by clicking on older and newer.

Post pages for blog posts

Image: Alexandra Koch

In the beginning was the blog page, but later on each blog post got its own page too.

These pages have web addresses that comprise the address of your blog, date of publication, and some text from the title of your blog post at publication.

It's called a permalink and can't be changed once the post goes live.

Your blog page ( home page)

photo: aaron burden

In the beginning was the blog, composed of posts.

The blog page, or home page, shows your most-recent posts in classic backwards order, last-first. Your readers see this page first when they navigate to your blog at its root address.

Many new bloggers want, or think they want, a static home page with a link to their blog page, and there are a fair number of tricks and hacks to achieve something like that.

However, Blogger is not set up to provide a static home page, and it is worth understanding the editorial rationale for starting with your most recent blog post.

When your blog journey is cut short

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.

When I converted my feed from Short to Jump Break, I hit an unexpected wall involving the blog-journey hack that lets you show your content in chronological order.

I've vaulted over the wall since (and you can too, if necessary), but here is the story.

Blogger's new jump-break-feed option

Bloggers can now set their feeds to end at the jump break while preserving most formatting and hypertext markup.

The new Feed option, which Blogger announced on December 9, is in addition to the the Full and Short options, which are still available. From my point of view, however, it is superior to the old choices in nearly every way. I urge all bloggers who care about feeds to check it out.

Until now, bloggers have had to choose between short feeds that are stripped of all formatting and links versus full feeds that comprise the entire blog.

Blogger software engineer Ben Eitzen details how the new jump-break feed works and how to chose it here.