[Update: I stumbled upon a feature of dasBlog that I didn't know about regarding date ranges. You can put a date in the query string of the main page (example, default.aspx?date=2003-12), and it will show only the entries from that date range. This works on both days and months; I haven't tried it for year. This is a good first step. Now, I need to figure out how to make it use a different template, so that I can have the archives just show the title of the entry.]
Well, before I moved to webhost4life (if you are thinking of moving to it, let me know, so I can be your referrer and get lots of money) and switched to dasBlog, I was using Blogger to keep up Corey's Ramblings. I had a grand old site back then, not just a blog, but pictures and links and contact information and random research projects (such as the history of twizzlers and whether high-octane gas really does any good for your car) and lots of good stuff. I've been promising to redo the site using either DotNetNuke or Rainbow, but I haven't got around to it. Oh, the plans I have!
Well, I have a lot of posts and archives over at my blogger version, so I was thinking about how to bring them into my current, dasBlog-based version. Now, converting them wouldn't be too hard, I could just have blogger spit out the posts in a nice xml format (perhaps rss), then write a small conversion utility to get them into the dasBlog format, but here comes the kicker: how do I get around to showing people them. I mean, I wrote a few good things on there, and I'm sure there are people out there like me who will go to someone's blog and read through their old posts. How do I give access to the old posts? This brought up an apparent missing part of dasBlog: an archive page. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to publish your archives through dasBlog. I haven't done a bunch of research on it, yet, but I was thinking that I could write a different theme which would display monthly views of my entries, rather than the last 10 entries).
So, here are the steps for my archive idea:
- Create a new theme for my site that contains short title-based views of the posts, similar to Rory's archive and make a new page in dasBlog that will show posts based on a date range (perhaps monthly to begin with) and apply the new theme to that page.
- ??????
- Profit.
Anyone else have any other ideas? Perhaps some dasBlog user out there already has done this?
Looking at the message board on gotdotnet workspaces for dasBlog, it looks like they are starting to work on having “articles” on your blog, which are special entries that can be pinned into a list somewhere, so people can go back and find them. I used to spend time research silly things and posting them to my blog, so this would be a great place for them.