Archives again, at last

Finally, after removing a couple of idiotic bugs and testing some corner cases, the Archives plugin is working well enough for daily use, making this site a lot more usable for the casual visitor. Sure, people who know what a Wiki is will go straight over to Recent Changes, but regular folk kept clicking on the Archives link and getting pretty much nowhere (since it was essentially a static page left over from the migration).

Designing blog archive pages is one of those chores nobody really wants to do, and I don’t have the time to do the brilliant kind of design that Michael had in the previous incarnation of Bonsai, play around with Ajax, or reinvent the wheel in yet another way, so I went for the “let’s make sure it works on anything” approach¹ and did a plain list controlled by bog-standard HTML controls (there isn’t even any JavaScript - yet).

I’ve also forced a (somewhat overdue) rebuild of all the site content (which I do every time something like a new plugin is put online), and you should be able to have a go at the Archives once the indexer is done with the (currently 4803) pages on this site.

And yes, there is still at least one bug - but I will get rid of it when I add some jQuery goodness to the table. There are other plugins that need the same treatment, so I might as well write a common solution.

Now, back to a good book. The other umpteen things I need to fix in Yaki before doing a new release can wait a bit more.