You Cannot Fit Your Entire Blog Onto The Main Page

Some blog owners would like their readers to view the entire blog in one page.

A small blog, with very limited size, can theoretically fit on one page. If you intend to publish a blog with any future, and page rank, you will have to publish content periodically - and the size of the blog will increase, steadily.

And eventually, thanks in part to main page limitation by auto pagination, older posts in your blog will be forced into archive pages.

For a blog with any future, and publishing activity, there are four possibilities for main page size.

• Segment main page, limiting post count.
• Segment your blog, using virtual blogs.
• Use a dynamic template, and "continuous scrolling".
• Use a non dynamic template, and Jump Break - and accept archiving.

Segment main page, limiting post count.

One of the simplest ways to make your blog reader friendly is to limit main page size, using a post count limit. This won't work as a final solution, however, if you're planning to publish the blog with any regularity.

Segment your blog, using virtual blogs.

If you can break your blog into multiple subjects, you can use a Pages tabbed index to access each different subject. You can fit each different subject, possibly using Jump Break, onto one page.

To complement the virtual blogs, you can have a static main page - providing a "welcome" message, and / or indexing the virtual blogs.

Use a dynamic template, and "continuous scrolling".

For public blogs, a dynamic template, with continuous scrolling, may provide a solution. Dynamic templates, unless you a very comfortable with editing the blog template, will never offer the accessory and customisation possibilities of non dynamic templates, however.

With a dynamic template, you won't be able to use Jump Break - though some dynamic views may provide a summarised main page view.

Use a non dynamic template, and Jump Break - and accept archiving.

Careful use of Jump Break will let you limit the size of the main page. If you continue to publish posts - which is necessary for a blog with any future - you will eventually have posts displayed on archive pages.

For best results, design the blog structure - and the posts structure - consistently, and accept archiving and pagination.

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Some #Blogger blog owners would like to display all post content in one page - and ignore page display size. They do not realise that not all blog readers want to read a blog with an unlimited page size, all at once.

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Duplicate Post URL Prevention, And Yearly Archiving

We see an occasional suggestion, in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger, about archive convenience.

Some blog owners, presumably ones who do not publish so often, would like to archive posts on a yearly basis.

It would be great, if you would add the option of "Yearly" under the Archive gadget "Archive Frequency".

This blog owner may not know why posts are archived on a weekly or monthly schedule.

One of the most challenging tasks in the post editor has to involve post URL creation.

Post URLs absolutely must be unique.

Besides having to create a URL from the post title, the post editor has to ensure that no URL duplicates a previous URL - after removal of unnecessary words. One unbreakable rule of Blogger posts is that no two posts can have the same URL.

Post URLs use a structure that includes the Year and Month, as "/yyyy/mm". That is how the Archive gadget opens the post list, for the "Monthly" archive option.

My previous post, on this subject - and the Archive gadget ("Contents") opened, to the month of its publishing.



The Archives gadget opens the post index to the proper year and month.

The Archive gadget display opens to the year and month of the first post on the page. It does that, by using the URL of the post displayed.

The Post:

Blogging - The Directory and URL Structure

The URL:

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2009/08/blogging-directory-and-url-structure.html

The Archives gadget can't show a year - or infinity - of posts.

See how the Archives gadget opens up, to the year / month ("/2009/08") of the post?

Can you imagine the performance issues, if the Archives gadget were to open up an entire years worth of posts? Then there is the resulting sidebar length increase - causing main page length increase.

The archives list for this blog, for 2009/08. I'm not going to try to display the entire list for 2009.



Every Blogger feature has to have limits, to make the Blogger service usable by everybody.

Like the oft misunderstood auto pagination feature, Blogger features should display only so much, at one time. One display limit includes retrieval of content - and archiving is an important component in limiting content retrieval.

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Some #Blogger blog owners would like to archive posts on a yearly basis, so they could open the Archives list for an entire year, at once.

Not all blog owners understand how the Archives display follows the post URL structure - which includes the year and month, to prevent URL duplication. Like auto pagination, monthly archiving limits mass content retrieval - and makes the Blogger service more useful, for everybody.

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