The Case for Effective Archives

The beauty of visiting bookstores is that there’s no set rules as to what you can do with the material as long as you don’t walk out not paying or destroy their property. You essentially escort yourself through long tranquil aisles, plucking out any title that seems intriguing, you peruse a couple pages and if any material is worth exploring more, you instinctively flip to the table of contents to examine what else the book has to offer.

With luck, the bookstore will have made a sale in view that everything you sought to look into was captivating enough to purchase the book. You committed yourself to it and this process is not too different when deciding to explore a blog.

Making them Explorable

When you develop a connection with an article on a blog, you feel compelled to review older entries through the Archives. A well designed Archives page is not only functional but also visually exciting and distinctive and when it’s not, the experience is just disappointing.

Consider the Archives page the table of contents of a book and if the reader is not able to locate relevant information that should provide an image of how the blog is organized, that alone makes it easy to lose interest and not buy the book as mentioned before.

There’s a reason behind the existence of so many great Wordpress plugins catered specifically for the Archives. The principal one being is that they are inherently plain and boring to look at so they require a little sprucing to make it easy to navigate and explore effectively.

Archives on Tumblr

One of the changes Tumblr made with version 5 was to enhance the quirky way in which the platform displayed its Archives and despite it’s refinement, it’s far from anything pleasing to go through especially if someone exceeds 60 or more post in a month.

Granted I use Tumblr and I love for the most part every feature that’s been released lately but can you see yourself going these cluster of boxes trying to find content worth reading? I don’t. There are distinguishing elements between each box to giving you a sense of what each is and what lies ahead before clicking on them but not to a point where it’s inviting to do so.

Simplistic & Attractive Archives

I probably should have taken the extra time to develop a mockup of how I envision the Tumblr Archives to look like but to give you a sense of what a simplistic and attractive archives page to me looks like, consider the following in no particular order:

• Ordered List: perfectly displays post titles and dates. As an added bonus, the presence of live search sweetens the deal.
• Justin Blanton: creator of WP plugin Smart Archives and he employs his quite nicely.
• Michael Mistretta: straightforward, intelligently organized along with sweet mini-icons to distinguish between a post and a link.

There is a hack that claims to display your Tumblr archives fancier but it falls short to me. Hopefully on Tumblr’s list of “things to improve for the platform”, the Archives is there somewhere.

2 years ago  /  Notes

The Tumblr Effect

For me Tumblr has been an amazing platform to use because it allows users to publish random bits of inspiration and has alleviated the pain of feeling that you have to fret over writing drawn-out post to consider yourself a legitimate blogger. You can gather anything you come across online and share it instantly, regardless of what the content is since the service caters to any form of creativity you throw at it.

Even though that’s never necessarily been my approach on using Tumblr, it took Michael’s observation of the service to reinforce what I’ve been secretly feeling.

While Tumblr has done an excellent job at making it easy for people to republish content to their own audience, I can’t help but feel that they’ve neglected the creation of original content.

To the defense of the select few of blog that I attentively follow on Tumblr, these are the ones that captivate me with their mixture of intriguing original and reblogged content infused with a viewpoint on what they publish and not coming across as endless stuff in a Digg-like manner as perhaps the majority of open accounts are like.

I’ll be the first to say that it’s a little too easy having the urge to publish content haphazardly in Tumblr where the substance of the material could be stronger and so that’s the challenge I set myself to in using it where the opportunity to produce original pieces is not overshadowed by the ease of republishing just anything.

Michael Hyatt says that “publishing is a humbling reminder that none of us can determine with absolute certainty what will work and what won’t” but imagine how much more refreshing it would be if the ambition of every blogger was to get people analyzing over their pieces to guarantee that at least every entry does work.

2 years ago  /  7 notes