People search for the strangest things - Many people don't know this, but when you web search via a service like Yahoo or Google, the sites that you end up at know what the search terms that you used to get there. It's due to a trick web masters call the "referrer URL". It's the address that was in your browser before you linked to their site. My site has only been up on its new host for a few weeks and today I thought I'd filter my web server logs for Google referrers. It took about a minute to extract that data from the entire web server detailed logs. When I looked at some of the search terms they made sense, but other.... whoa! Some people scare me. In nearly every case the match was to one of my monthly archive pages. Because the monthly archives were large collections of a month's worth of web postings, it was more possible that the individual words of someone's web search would be somewhere on that month's archive. Rarely was it in one sentence, paragraph or thought.
Monthly archives are now calendars - So to stop having the archives be large, slow loading files collecting an entire month's worth of postings, I did some major template overhauling this evening. The monthly archives are now calendar pages that show the titles of entries. If you want to see what I mean, try the "Monthly Archives" menu at the top of the main page. Click on a date with entries and you are taken to a page with all the entries for that one day. Usually there's just one but occasionally I write more than one on a day, or Suzy and I both write on the same day. While on the calendar view if you click on an individual title and you'll be taken to just the individual entry.
Benefits - While it causes the website to have many more files, the files are much smaller -- about 10% of the original size. For dialup modem users, this should lead to quicker navigation and browsing of the archives. Hopefully I'll soon have fewer search engine users coming to my website via really, really weird search terms. Let me know what you think. And if you want some search term examples that landed at my website, email me by clicking on my name below on "Posted by Scott".