Blog Indexing

Apple writes about Creating a Blog Index.

Her post made me think about my attempts at organizing the growing information on my blog. Originally, like her, I focused on the labels that Blogger provides (On other blogging systems they are often called categories.) And I had all the labels listed in my sidebar. A list that grew and grew.

Recently Blogger added a feature that allows you to selectively add labels to your sidebar. (It's no longer all or none.) So now I have three listings: 1) Posts by Surnames 2) Posts by Locale 3) Carnivals and Memes. There are many other labels I have used in the past, and continue to use, but they are no longer in the sidebar.

The only 'true' index I have created is an index of my Amenuensis Monday transcriptions, which I have placed on my main website - where I also have created some lists of genealogy resources. This blog may someday leave Blogspot and return to its original location. I moved it here at a time when there was nothing else genealogical on my website and I wanted to make this separate.

The search features Blogger offers eliminates some need for indexing. The search box in the "Blogger bar" doesn't work very well -- it doesn't conduct an every-word search on the posts, and misses a lot. However, the Search Gadget they provide for the sidebar does a much better job. And recently they added the ability to search every page linked to from the blog, as well. I'm not certain how comprehensive this feature is, but it looks impressive.