Although there are only two controls found on the Archive Settings administration page, they are very important to your Blogger.com blog. This post will cover the two controls found on this page and describe what they are, and what they do. As well, I’ll discuss a little about their impact to your blog.

One thing to note about the ViewsOnLife blog is that I have just switched themes to a more blue and pleasant looking theme. We are getting close to discussing templates, which I believe everyone has been clamoring for, and I’m preparing the environment for that.

Note to new visitors! If you would like to know more about this series or view all available lessons, just follow the appropriate link.

The Archive Settings Administration Page

Like I said, there are two controls found on this page. Archive Frequency and Enable Post Pages. They are mutually exclusive of each other in functionality as one doesn’t effect the other, but each make significant changes to your blog that you should be aware of.

Archive Frequency

The Archive Frequency control directly impacts how your Blog Archive component groups your posts together. The default value is ‘Monthly’, which you can see in the images below.

The values will look like this when you select them:

  • No Archive – Your blog archive control will not show at all. Donut.
  • Daily – Will show each day in the archive
    archive Daily
  • Weekly – Will group your posts by week
    archive Weekly
  • Monthly – The default selection, and perhaps the most popular.
    archive Monthly

This is one of those things, like most other administration controls that you set once and then forget about.

Enable Post Pages

The enable post pages option will control how your pages URL will be formatted. Changing this value will change all references to your posts, so be sure to understand this option before making changes!

When you enable post pages, each post will get it’s own URL, or post page. For example, my poem ‘Happy on Life!’ is accessed by the following URL:

Post Page:
http://www.viewsonlife.net/2008/08/happy-on-life.html

However, when I change the enable post pages value to ‘No’, it now becomes this:

Non-Post Page:
http://www.viewsonlife.net/2008_08_17_archive.html#6479677873704510626

What the hell is that (you might ask)?!?!? Recognize the URL? It’s Blogger’s archive page, the same one you might access from a link on your Blog Archive control.

You get to chose either one format or the other here, and I’ll express my own opinion that Enabling Post Pages is better than turning them off. Why? I can come up with a few reasons.

  1. The URL is more reader friendly. Yes, it still may be a lot for someone to type in, but it’s less than the alternative!
  2. It is of higher value for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts. A search engine reading the second URL doesn’t get the benefit of the post title within the URL, whereas the first URL does.
  3. The second link simply takes you to the archive page, where the selected post could be bundled on the same page with other posts that the user was not necessarily interested in.

If you are running a blog that has been up for a while, you should not make a change to your post settings. Unless of course you currently have Enable Post Pages set to ‘no’. Why?

Because when you have the ‘No’ value set, your links are all going to an archive page. So even when you switch it to ‘Yes’, your archive pages will still be there. The same is not true the other way around.

When you have enabled post pages, Blogger takes extra steps to provide those post pages. When you Disable post pages, they simply disappear, causing many dead links, and many potential nights of headaches.

Take a few moments to review your own settings and if there is anyone that has questions about these controls, or any within the prior lessons, just leave a comment and we’ll get you through the day.

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