Visual indicator for monthly archives
Links to monthly archives allow you to page chronologically through entries of a blog. The links are usually presented as a list that grows ever longer: April 2008, March 2008, February 2008, etc.. I found this a bit boring, and made a graph to present this information as a visual indicator for my posting activity. See the graph in action on the home page of alexome.com.
The graph presents a month as a dot that links to the archive of that month. The most recent 8 month are arranged relative to each other in terms of the number of entries. A month with many entries is shown higher up on the scale than a month with a few entries. The distances between the dots are proportional to the differences between the number of entries.
For comparison, this is how blog archives usually look like: tompeters.com/recently, blog.guykawasaki.com/archives, superfluousbanter.org/archives.
The links can be arranged in a compact table. See shauninman.com/archive or kottke.org/everfresh. Another alternative is to use a drop-down menu.
People are smart enough to edit a URL such as www.alexome.com/2008/04/ to jump to any month. It can therefore be sufficient to show only the latest two or three links. In the case of my graph, i use the most recent 8 month.
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