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Getting Started with CrimsonBlog.com: Setting up Archives
How Permalinks Work
Now that you've set up your Template, you may notice that at the end of each weblog post is a "time stamp" with the time of each post.
Here's an example from our WebCrimson news and updates section:
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I've written an article about the story behind WebCrimson:
| posted by John - 5:33 am
Monday, June 17, 2002
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I've pulled together a quick features list for WebCrimson v 2.0, if you're curious what we do. |
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Go ahead and click on either time stamp - a new page should pop up, using built-in browser tricks to bring you precisely to the exact point on the page where that posts begins.
This browser-trick lets each post have a unique link, even when there are multiple posts on a single page.
This trick is called a "permalink" and it can come in handy.
Suppose, for example, that you're visiting the WebCrimson June 2002 News and Updates page and think that my post about our new Feature list is worth sending on to a friend. You could send your friend a link to the entire page:
But when your friend clicks on that link, they won't know which entry you're referring to. But if you send them a link with a permalink in it, they'll go straight to the entry in question:
You can put permalinks in your template using the $Perma_Link$ tag. You can get more detail on these sorts of tags here.
Relationship between Permalinks and Archive Pages
In short, every time you publish a post on your weblog, WebCrimson generates two pages using your template:
- your blog frontpage, and
- an Archive page.
By default, both of these pages are generated using the same template: the Main Page template. If you'd like to use separate templates for both, you can do so in your template settings.
We've conveniently configured it so that both of these pages have all of their posts come complete with permalinks. These permalinks will take the user from the blog frontpage to the location on the Archive Page where the post begins.
Archive Links
Your template settings are set by default to generate "monthly archives". In other words, if you write three posts in September 2002, they will all be stored on the same page.
The URL of the page will probably look something like this:
If you write several posts in August 2002, they will also be stored on the same page. The URL of that page would probably look something like this:
As the months go by, you may find yourself with more and more months of archives being generated.
For example, here are the archives for Microcontent News as of September 2002:
February 2002
March 2002
April 2002
May 2002
June 2002
July 2002
August 2002
September 2002
This list of links can automatically be generated by an Archive Links template.
Editing your Archive Links Template
Once you've selected your template, you can edit your Archive Links template by clicking on the "Archive Links" link:
The code in the above screenshot is actually all you need to generate a list of links to your archives, similar to the Microcontent News Archive Links example.
Configuring Archives
You can change the frequency of archiving, if you like.
You can archive blog posts as frequently as weekly or as rarely as annually. You can even turn off archiving entirely if it suits you. These controls are all under your template Settings - you can find more detailed information here.
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