On Tue, 2005-11-29 at 12:50, Dave Johnson wrote: > On Nov 29, 2005, at 2:15 PM, Allen Gilliland wrote: > > gotcha. definitely seems like something we should continue to have. > > Yep, we need some way to page back in time. > > > > i will admit though, that i think our weblog entry pagification is a > > bit quirky and messed up. i don't use it, so it doesn't bother me > > much, but i know of 2 things that i've noted in the past. > > > > 1. the next/previous links don't work properly for permalinks. > > previous works, but next always goes to the most recent entry. > > That's how it should work on a single entry page.
really? why should the "next" link always go to the most recent entry? shouldn't it link to the next chronological entry? i.e. if I have 3 blog posts on 10/12/05 and I am looking at the permalink for the second entry posted on that day, then I would expect the "previous" link to point to the first entry from that day, and the "next" link to point to the last entry from that day. right now that doesn't happen. > > > > 2. a date based archive like /page/20050920 shows a full page of > > entries rather than just the entries from that day. why? > > That's how Roller has always worked, and it's wrong. It causes cache > duplication and it can even prevent people from viewing entries. For > example, let's say you have 50 posts on one day, but you're blog is > configured to show only the most recent 15 entries. You miss entries 16 > through 50. > > > > it seems to me that we should support all 3 date based urls, /2005, > > /200509, /20050920, and each should be limited to the scope of the > > date presented. i.e. if someone just puts the year then they will > > only see entries for that year, same for month, same for day. > > We should definitely support single-entry, day, month and year views. > For the year and month views, we might want to get creative and show a > calendar rather than a bandwidth-busting big page of entries. I agree that we don't want to just dump 300 entries onto a single page for the year 2005, but we should think a bit more about the calendar idea. The nice thing about showing a calendar is that essentially we would be forcing people to use either permalinks or a single day archive which would cut down on the number of rendered pages we have. The drawback is that some people will want to have a monthly archive which just lists entries from that month starting from the beginning and possibly requiring multiple pages if there are too many entries for one page. Another consideration is category based archives. We have the same problem when someone could potentially have 200 entries marked in one category, how do we display that category based archive? We can't use day or permalink archives for that. > > But the main page of a blog should display some number of days recent > posts, with the option of displaying them grouped by day. > > So, if we provide access to month, day and year views, do we really > need a way to page back in time in chunks of X entries at a time? I > like that features, but it causes weblog entries to be duplicated in > the cache (since each also appears on a single entry page). This is a very tough decision. I think it would be helpful to step back and rethink exactly how we want to deal with displaying archived entries in general. What ways do people want to access their weblog entry data and how can we best facilitate that? I think you could certainly argue that we should provide some way for bloggers to have a page that shows XX entries in a row starting at entry YY, but when do people really want that functionality? Interstingly enough, as part of the process for updating our caching keys I actually decided that I needed to better section out the different types of weblog pages that we currently support. I narrowed the pages into 3 sections, MAIN (the weblog main page), PERMALINK (a single entry archive), and ARCHIVE (a multi entry archive). I think the MAIN and PERMALINK pages are pretty well scoped, but the ARCHIVE pages are not. By that I mean that we don't really have a clear strategy right now on how to best handle ARCHIVE pages and it seems like this is something we should spend a little time discussing. Just thinking out laud now, but one possiblity I had considered was something like this ... - the MAIN page only shows the XX most recent entries for a weblog (/page/<handle>) - a PERMALINK page shows only a single entry (/page/<handle>/permalink/<anchor>) - an ARCHIVE shows a multi entry page (pagified if needed) (/page/<handle>/archive/*) * archive/2005 * archive/200509 * archive/20050920 * archive/category * archive/category?page=3 something like this would give us a bit more url structure than we have now and allow for a bit more organization. we could then allow a Roller user to define special templates for an ARCHIVE page versus a PERMALINK page versus the MAIN page so that they could control how they work. -- Allen
