Opening the Archive - Russell Beattie

Russell is evaluating his archive options. Excellent topic. Here's what I posted to his site:

Hi Russell! Opening the archive is something that I think is absolutely critical. I've long believed that publishing is one half of the fun of blogging and nostalgia is the other half. The key is that it should be seamless. People aren't going to actively try to surf the archive. But by creating features that leverage this massive collection of personal content we can find value. I've put a lot of features into reger.com to open the each person's archive. On This Day in History puts links on the homepage to things that happened exactly 1,2,3,etc years ago. Related Entries throws a search at all entries to find ones that are similar to the one that you're currently viewing. Time Periods show me what overlapping periods of time an entry occurred in so that I can click on that period and see other entries. The standard calendar view. The standard log-by-log view. The ability to view entries by the location that the entry occurred. By author (for multi-author sites). Opening the archive is critical. Good luck with it! You can see all of these tools in action at my personal website http://www.joereger.com/ Later, Joe

Open the archive! Publishing is important, but 50 years from now you're gonna want to look back and wax philosophical.