I spent some time over the weekend adding a Title Index to the blog here, and also rearranging the monthly archive pages. In the past, the monthly archives had URLs of the form /diary/year/year_month.htm. That is, the archive for October 2005 was http://www.mischel.com/diary/2005/2005_10.htm. I don’t remember how I came up with that convention, but it’s kind of wonky. I’ve changed things now so that the URLs are of the form /diary/year/month/index.htm, so that if you want to see entries for October 2005, you can go to http://www.mischel.com/diary/2005/10. I’ve created redirect commands so that the existing old-format URLs will work, but there won’t be any old format URLs for new months.
I suspect that the Title Index will be useful mostly to me. In almost six years of blogging I’ve covered a lot of different topics, and I find myself referring back to them quite often. I’ve been using Google to search the site, but I think the Title Index will be much easier and it will prevent me having to filter the Google search results when I know that what I’m searching for is in the entry’s title.
I’ve said before that I’d like to move to a different blogging program. The problem is finding the time to convert everything, and I dislike the idea of trying to keep two blogs in sync for even a short period. I’m pretty sure now that I won’t be installing WordPress or any other blogging software on my server. I am, however, considering either moving the blog to one of the blogging sites, or switching to a provider who includes blogging software as part of the hosting package.