Creating a title index page?

Feedback Feature requests
1

Is there a way to create a pinned page with an automatically updated chronological index of clickable post titles?

2

There’s a custom way to do this. One user, @dino, has done this through adding an embedded Glitch app that creates an automatically updating, chronological index. Here it is on his blog for reference:

All you need to do is create a free account on Glitch and follow the instructions here to remix the archive app for your site. The steps are minimal on the technical front — all you need to do is add your blog’s username & url in a special file, embed the app into a Write.as post, and you’re set!

If you run into any trouble then let us know. Some other people have this archive app on their blog and would be happy to help you set it up!

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3

Thanks for the suggestion.

Glitch is a third party, I could say I do not like their (privacy) policy, but the important factor for me is it is a service not from write.as

So this would be a suggestion for a feature request: that write.as has the ability to generate a pinned index page with the topic titles.

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4

No worries @CFS! I just made this into a feature request so others can chime in.

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5

I would love this feature as well! An archive sidebar might be kind of nice.

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6

Another vote for either a pinned index page or an index sidebar. Prefer sidebar, but would use whichever was implemented first.

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7

Vote from me too. Weird WA does not have this. I know, there’s the RSS and the tiny pages, but that’s nothing like a proper title index page. And I know, if you have 500 posts, that’s a loooong index page. But it is useful for so many things, and people.

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8

I’m wondering if anyone has this implemented to generate and index page? The original poster seems to no longer have it on his blog.

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9

Is davepolaschek — Write.as what you want? Did that with CSS. Feel free to borrow it.

11

That looks great, it’s exactly what I’m searching for. Can you please explain how you did this?

12

I used the following CSS:

.hidden {
  opacity: 1;
}

.book {
	display: none;
}

.read-more {
	display: none;
}

.h-entry {
	justify-content: space-between;
	display: flex;
}

Setting .book and .read-more to “display: none” is most of the trick to hide the entry text and just show the titles. The rest, IIRC, is just to get the little bit of text that’s displayed looking like I wanted.

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13

Thank you very much for your explanation! That works like a charm on my blog now and is a very good workaround until Write.as gets better support for blogs.

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14

Hey everyone, I’ve made some progress on this and I’d love your feedback!

As of now, all Pro blogs have an archive page here: https://write.as/yourblog/archive/ – that is, just add /archive/ to your blog URL to access it (here’s an example).

Note: if you already have a post named archive, it isn’t gone – you’ll just need to add that extra / at the end to get to this automatic archive page.

Obviously this is still missing some kind of navigation for people to get to the page, so I’d like to know:

  • Are you okay with it living at the /archive/ URL, or would you like to customize the page slug? (Maybe you’d like to use index or “archive” in the same language as your blog.)

  • Would you like to be able to customize the archive page itself, e.g. by setting your own title and text around it?

  • Would you always want this link to live in your navigation bar?

  • If so, are you okay with it saying “Archive”, or would you want to customize this?

If you have any ideas, including how you’d incorporate this page into your blog today, please share! I’ll use this feedback to finish up this new feature.

4 Likes
15

Hi, @matt ! That’s great news! Thanks!

I already had an “Archive” page that I use to see my posts by hashtags. So I added the link to /archive/ in my original Archive page to see the posts grouped by year. That seems to work for me.

I was wondering if there could be a way to choose to go directly to a specific year (like a drop down) ?

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16

I think my not-Pro blog was effected by this Pro bloghttps://write.as/yourblog/archive/ update, problem is I can’t “undo” it even when I try to remove /archive from my url, it is permanently in archive mode and my public view is all gone :confused:

17

See this thread – there was never any data loss, just a bad redirect. All fixed now!

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18

Very nice! I did want to leave room for situations like this, where you might want something different for an Archive page – so glad that this allows that.

I would like to add this option, yep! A drop down (or maybe a sidebar of links?) could definitely work.

19

Hi Matt, thanks for this new feature. It works great!
I indeed already have an archive from articles I wrote when I had a blog on WordPress.
So for me it would be nice to be able to rename this archive to something like “index”. Also in the url. Like
https://mistynotes.nl/archive/
becoming
https://mistynotes.nl/index/
Thanks again for all the hard work and support.

20

Great feature Matt, thanks. But I’d prefer the archive page to match blog’s theme. For example, my blog has a sans serif font for body text but the archive has a serif one.

Yes.

That would be nice to have but I don’t have an immediate need for such a feature.

Yes, like a pinned post.

I’m okay. Again, customization would be nice to have but I have no immediate need for it.

21

I’d also like a better mobile layout. Here’s for example my blog’s archive page in Chrome on Android: the dates don’t line up. I realize space is limited but maybe the dates could be abbreviated on small screens (e.g. Aug 3).

Also, some dates are in my Italian locale (e.g. 30 luglio) and don’t match the post’s language. It would greatly help to have a blog-wide default language setting that applies also to metadata, not just the text of posts.

archive-mobile
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