We agree with Branko Collin–most blog archives are a mess, including TeleRead’s, powered by Blogger. If nothing else, a category-organized system like WordPress‘s or TypePad‘s could bring some order. A decent search engine isn’t the full solution. Still, we might replace the present searcher with Google‘s, which is better. And meanwhile Craig Froehle points out that people can always use Google’s site delimiter.
As much of a usability wonk as even I am, I think this complaint is overlooking one thing: Google.
With Google, there’s not much point in worrying about the usability of an archive interface so long as search engine spiders can find them, catalogue them, and archive them.
Moreover, with Google’s “Site:” delimiter, a comprehensive search of the archives is fairly trivial. Nobody really cares about how the blogger organizes things–the only real test of usability is whether the author uses enough reasonable keywords that a straightforward search will find his writings.
Just my 2 cents, of course. Always enjoying TeleRead…
– Craig
Hey, many would care about category-grouped links of the kind that WordPress can help generate–handy for focused browsing if the right keywords are not present or just escape you–but Craig’s entitled.
