Tech T.I.P 6/10/2010

Managing Your Blog Archives

by Denise Barrett Olson

Although the blog platform is one of the easiest ways to publish online, it does have a few drawbacks. One of the biggest is the blog archive. Once your blog post rolls off the home page, who will ever find it again? Granted, some platforms do better than others, but for those of us documenting graveyards, families and local history, all could use some improvement. Until that happens, here are some things you can do to improve access to your archived posts.

Every blog platform offers the ability to organize archived posts by date. Although there may be readers and publishers who can remember archived articles by the month/year they were published, my guess is they are few and far between. Another possibility is the search engine - both the search box on your blog and the big guys like Google and Yahoo. While these do offer access to archived posts, they have limited capabilities.

One good way to organize your posts is through the use of tags. Just about every blog platform - from micro to full-service - offers the ability to include tags with each post. [Blogger calls them Labels.] Tags usually appear as links in the metadata associated with each blog (author, date published, tags, etc.). Each tag link will display all the other posts tagged with that keyword. Most blog platforms also include widgets to display your tags in the blog’s sidebar. Sometimes they are displayed as a “cloud” of keywords and sometimes as a list. Once again, clicking on a particular tag will display all its posts.

You can include multiple tags, making this capability even more flexible. For example, if I’m writing a post about Robert Murphy’s gravestone at St. Augustine National Cemetery, I’d include at least three tags: gravestone, surname:Murphy, St. Augustine National Cemetery. By developing a scheme of standard tag keywords, you can provide a simple way to retrieve posts by topic. At my GYR site, I always include tags identifying the cemetery and topic of the article. When writing about individual gravestones, I include the person’s surname. So, a reader who wants to learn more about St. Augustine National Cemetery can just click on the cemetery tag at the bottom of this article about Mr. Murphy to display all the other articles tagged with that tag.

You’ll notice that I use the format “surname:Murphy”. I do that because I have several surnames - like my Link family - which are tough to search. By including the surname: prefix, searches will still find the tag even if they are only searching for “Murphy”, but people searching for “surname:Murphy” won’t have to weed through a bunch of useless stuff too. Yes, I know that until this idea catches on throughout the genealogy community, it isn’t helping much, but you’ve gotta start somewhere . . .

Speaking of searching, these tags not only help organize your blog site, but they also make your posts easier to find using the big search engines. Tags are not just a blog feature, they are used in many other platforms like Flickr (photo-sharing), YouTube (video-sharing) and social networks. Search engines put tags to work to help them discover and organize all this online content.

WordPress and TypePad also include a category feature where you can set up your own system of categories to organize your content. I’m not sure about TypePad, but WordPress allows you to nest categories - similar to an outline. This gives you even more flexibility.

If you have control of your template (which usually costs extra for hosted blogs), you can create custom page designs for your top level categories. In the example shown here, the Family Matters section page within the Moultrie Creek Gazette blog has its own logo with the associated posts listed underneath. If you looked at the URL for this page, you will see it includes “cat=1” at the end meaning it is displaying a list of items assigned category number 1 (the Family Matters category). Even if you don’t have control of your template, you can set up a blogroll of links to the sections within your blog - similar to the Inside the Gazette example you see here at the top of the sidebar.

Most blog platforms have widgets that display your categories in the sidebar. Some offer both nested list and category cloud options. By copying the URLs for specific categories, you can easily create custom tables of content to specific types of content. These same ideas work for tags.

Your blog is full of valuable content. With a little effort on your part, you can make sure those earlier posts continue to get the attention they deserve. Take advantage of your blog platform’s capabilities to provide our readers with easy access to those archives.

It wouldn’t hurt to spotlight an archived article now and again either.