So I noticed something the other day: about half my archives won’t load. Presumably (since it’s the larger ones, starting at around 210 entries) they are timing out as they are built dynamically.
Well. That sucks.
I could (indeed, it’s recommended, for performance reasons) change them back to static pages. Except that robs me of the truly impressive rebuild times I now have.
Worse, it occurs to me that, lacking those archives, my Google links through the site are now frelled until I get it fixed.
For the category archives, I could break them up by doing subcategories. That’s been on my list to do with MT3. Indeed, I started building a new elaborate cat/subcat architecture that would solve a number of current organizational problems. And, frankly, having the archives be dynamic at this point helps that tremendously, since it makes the rebuild times trivial.
Except, it occurs to me, the current tool I use as a client to MT, SharpMT, doesn’t yet support subcategories, since it hasn’t been updated for MT3.
Well.
Hmmm. Actually, now that I test it, it does — just as a flat extra category in the list (note to self – must name things with the appropriate master category prefix in the sub-category’s name). Actually, it appears that MT will treat all subcategories as flat categories (when using the <MTCategories> tag) or will present them hierarchically (when using the <MTSubCategories> tag). Which is both convenient and annoying.
So I could do that. Or, even if that hadn’t worked, I could have just created a flat set of extra categories, named appropriately. And it desperately needs to be done to break things into manageable chunks, since right now I have two categories with over 600 entries (Media and Blogging) and another one over 500 (Geopolitical Brouhaha), and several with 400+.
For the monthly archives, it’s a bit trickier. Two alternatives come to mind:
- Do just extracts instead of entire posts. Relatively simple to do.
- Change from monthly to weekly. Retains the whole text. But I hate weekly archives.
I’m probably going to do #1. (Which, actually, I could do with categories if I wanted. And may yet, in order to sift things out into smaller subcats.)
So … since this is going to be a relatively long process, expect some dust in the archives for a while.