[Tb] Weblog implementation strategy (Part 1)

Dear Oliver

You have raised a very interesting question. I too started off by
adapting one of the supplied weblog documents and its templates, and
was happy to do so as it provided a basis for learning about TB and
HTML publishing.

Eventually I could see that my Archives container was going to become
too big to be useful. So I created new containers that take out three
months worth of postings at a time into quarterly archives. Each of
those posts is currently available as a link from my Archives page.
Every three months I create a new Agent with updated Query. I also
freeze the notes in the previous Agents so TB does not have to keep
collecting them. This may not be necessary, frankly.

The current state is that my Archives Agent contains every posting I
have ever written. But I barely use it. and I do not publish it to
HTML. I use it only to create a new note. The new note is collected
into my Main page and that is where I tend to work on things.

In some ways I wish it were easier to create a new note in a specific
container that does not, in fact, have an agent to collect notes. I
have not found a way to do this without cluttering up the root level,
so I am happy enough to have most of my notes hidden in the Archive
container.

When I was publishing the Archives as a single note, with Named
Anchors as the references to each of the child notes, it was taking far
too long to do the updating. That was the original reason why I changed
my archiving method.

I have about 180 notes at present, because I write only once or twice a
week. So far I do not find this set-up a problem, but it would be if
there were 1000 notes.

At a somewhat more abstract level, I'm not sure that TB is the ideal
tool for a large weblog, partly because the pages are static. So a
change to, say, a sidebar item has to ripple through each and every
page that displays the sidebar. I can see this leading to longer and
longer upload times if I continue to export each page as essentially
static. One way around this would be to export the pages with iFrames
to include the sidebar material, but I haven't reached that state yet.

I don't use Movable Type or any of the other blogging systems that TB
is capable of exporting to, but it seems to me that this could be the
best possible solution. I see, for example, that Derek Powazek, who
designed some of the TB templates (Gray Flannel, and others) has a very
interesting post at http://www.powazek.com/2004/04/000386.html that
expresses this idea better than I, with my lack of experience, ever
could.

Jeremy

On 3 Apr 2004, at 14:46, Oliver Wrede wrote:

>
> -- All weblog posts in one "Archives" container? --
>
Received on Mon Apr 5 13:25:04 2004