Don't paginate this. I want to see at a glance the titles of all the posts the author wrote. I want to be able to ctrl-f to search these titles. Heck, even if you had 100k titles they could still easily be shown on one page, as it would compress to 1 or 2MB transmitted on the wire which is still more lightweight than the average web page size.
Another reason: I'll often come across a blog post from 12 years where the author writes "in my next post, I'll continue to discuss..."
And how the heck am I supposed to find that next post? They didn't add a hyperlink, obviously, because they hadn't written it yet. Sometimes a blog has posts you can navigate by month, but that's definitely a small minority of blogs I come across.
If there was just a single-page index, I could Ctrl+F the title of the current article, and quickly see what followed it chronologically.
Subscribe to the blog's RSS feed?
Especially blogs that are part of broader news publications, in my experience.
But yes you're right when there is a feed you can open that in Chrome and Ctrl+F, at least.
(Obviously my complaints come from blogs that don't have this. But also, opening an XML file isn't exactly user-friendly, and 99% of end users would never know to do it.)
…okay sure, technically yes, but not one I will be able to follow, or remember to read until it pops up in someone else's aggregator or links in the future.
That's not my experience.
Which has the 10 or 20 most recent posts, but not the post from 12 years ago. If it's a wordpress blog, you can use pagination tricks to get older posts, but, AFAIK, there's no standard way to say "Give me all of the posts" when fetching the RSS feed.
Not very common though in my experience.
Worse than that is the "part 3" blog post, where the opening paragraph of part 3 starts out with something like:
In part 1 we discussed "...one or two sentences on part 1..." and in part 2 we discussed "...part 2 quick overview..." ...
And there are no links at all in part 3 to either of parts 1 or 2 (yet, presumably, part 3 was written after parts 1 and 2, so links back to 1 and 2 could have been inserted). If one came across part 3 from a search, and landed on it for the first time, one just might want to start at part 1 and read forward.
Many sites have it, since it is helpful for SEO. Examples:
https://www.1500days.com/sitemap.xml (Wordpress) https://dri.es/sitemap.xml (Drupal, illegible though) https://aaron.axvigs.com/sitemap.xml (Drupal, legible)
- They're often only URL's which may not have titles or dates at all
- They're often not in any particular order (there's no reason for them to be chronological, so they frequently aren't)
- They're often paginated as well, where sitemap.xml just refers to multiple <sitemapindex> pages, so you can't Ctrl+F on a single page anyways
- You don't get one per-blog if there are multiple blogs on a domain
- You get all the other junk from the rest of a site if it's a blog that's part of a larger site
I haven't yet re-added a search feature since I migrated off Wordpress to hugo
I mean, just make sure that your blog is easily consumed by any web search engine.
And in addition to the full non-paginated index, I also have a full non-paginated tags page. Like categories, but with pages showing multiple times if they have multiple tags.
https://blog.pwkf.org/tags.html
My pet feature I'll try to add is sidenotes. It does annoys me to jump back and forth to read them. Even as a popup (wikipedia style), it is still intrusive...
<form action="https://duckduckgo.com/" method="get">
<label>▷ <input type="search" id="search" name="q" /></label>
<input type="hidden" name="sites" value="johnnydecimal.com" />
<input type="submit" value="Search" style="display: none;" />
</form>
I've got a variant of this on my own blog [1]. Full site contents generated automatically from (and grouped by) the content's tags.
To avoid the appearance of self-promotion, I'll balance this with an up-front warning that the actual content makes the opportunity cost of visiting debatable unless you're really curious ...
2013, Bitcoin hits $1k: https://blog.zorinaq.com/1-bitcoin-1000-us-dollars/ "Sure a crash that would bring it back down to below $1,000 is possible or likely, but it would not change its long-term prospect, a few years from now, from being valued between $5,000 and $50,000 and possibly more."
from then, 4 years to $5k, 8 years to $50k.