Creating a title index page?

[yungleary]

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

[economic-networks]

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

[writeprivacy]

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.

[writeprivacy]

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.

Share what you are working on and using!

Ahh! SO cool that you saw that and thought to share it here! Thanks so much @cjeller1592! My code’s a little bit spaghetti-ish and might be a little buggy! I’m 100% sure someone here could find a much cleaner solution! I wrote it so people using my tutorials/class could jump to the parts they need or go back to where they left off. One more heads up before I put the code and explain it: you need to add <div id="toc"></div> to posts where you want the table of contents to appear. I also recomm…

[davepolaschek]

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

[edenwheeler]

1. Log in to your Write. as account and go to the dashboard.
2. Create a new post or choose an existing one for your pinned page.
3. On the pinned page, list the post titles in chronological order.
4. Make each title clickable by using Markdown syntax: [Post Title] (post-URL).
5. Update the pinned page whenever you publish a new post.

By following these steps, you can create a pinned page with an automatically updated index of clickable post titles on Write.as.

[McPringle]

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

[davepolaschek]

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.

[McPringle]

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.

[matt]

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.

[ariadnemm]

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) ?

[blueoaks]

@matt

https://write.as/yourblog/archive/

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

[matt]

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

[matt]

@ariadnemm

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.

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.

@ariadnemm

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

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

[mistynotes]

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.

[PaoloAmoroso]

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.

@matt

• 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.)

Yes.

@matt

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

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

@matt

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

Yes, like a pinned post.

@matt

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

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

[PaoloAmoroso]

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.

[PaoloAmoroso]

@PaoloAmoroso

Also, some dates are in my Italian locale (e.g. 30 luglio) and don’t match the post’s language.

I forgot to set the post’s language. Which underscores the need for a blog-wide default language setting.

Back to the mobile layout of the archive page, another option may be to remove the months and days of the posts altogether on small screens.

[writeprivacy]

• 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 prefer using “index”

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

yes please, adding some markdown text above and/or below would be great

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

Yes please!

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

I prefer “index”

• A drop down (or maybe a sidebar of links?)

Yes please

• prefer the archive page to match blog’s theme

Yes please

• better (mobile) layout. maybe the dates …

Could I suggest to start with the dates? So have the dates before the post title? Maybe have the date in ISO, like 10 JUN and 10 AUG?

• blog-wide default language setting

Yes please

Right now the list is limited to 40 titles with the “older” link somewhat lost at the bottom. If I could I’d set it at 80 or 100 posts, and have the “older” link more referenced.

I would add a selection of 5 or 6 # at the top.

And finally, I love it when javascript is not needed, so that people browsing without javascript still have a fab experience.

[davepolaschek]

Hey Matt,

Thanks for this. I strongly prefer archive over index, which to me smacks very much of index.html and rankles the caveman HTML developer in me.

A different date format might be nice, as would some form of “by year” or “by month,” but I don’t feel strongly about any of that. I’ll probably keep using my own hacked-up-css version for now, mostly because I’m used to its quirks.