Blog navigation stupidity

Select a blog uniformly at random from all the blogs out there. Chances are very high that somewhere on a bar down the side of the blog you'll find an "Archives" section which lets you look at entries from a specific month and year. Click a month/year and you'll get entire entries from that time, paginated across a few pages if there are a lot of them.

The chances are essentially zero that you will find a link anywhere which takes you to a page with just the titles of all the entries ever made in chronological order.

My blog has a page like the latter, but that was really something of an accident: I banged out most of my little Python/SQLite CMS in a single sitting with minimal forethought, and certainly couldn't be bothered implementing proper pagination, so I wrote that page. In retrospect, I really like it and am kind of surprised that it seems so very, very rare in other blogs.

Realistically, if you discover an interesting new blog with a long history you haven't read, what are you more likely to think? "I wonder what kinds of things this person has written about in the past?", or "I wonder what this person wrote in July 3 years ago?". A tag cloud can give you a vague sense for the kinds of things a person may write about, but a Ctrl-F-able listing of all entry titles really is the ultimate overall navigation paradigm for a blog. It lets you quickly identify the most interesting articles throughout the whole history of the blog, without any tedious pagination. You don't have to scroll past all the text of an entry you aren't interested in, just the title. In contrast, the month/year archive link paradigm actually feels almost completely useless to me (perhaps with very limited exceptions - "what did this person write in September 2001?"), yet it is almost universal. My blog has those links too (though just for years, not months), but I just implemented them blindly because, well, every blog has those links, right? They feel like core functionality, but in actuality I think they're pretty close to useless. Something makes them a very effective meme. Meanwhile, a really simple and effective navigation system is basically unused.