Okay, so I’m sort of a verbose guy. A quick glance at the sidebar indicates over 8,000 posts here at DDtB. And even though I have lots of categories to file things into, some of those categories get pretty darned big, as do the monthly archives.
As an example, this main index page has 30 entries in at any given time. I have categories with almost 900 entries (Media). And even the monthly archives get to close to 250 at their high water mark (8/2004, the last Blogathon).
Now, if I were diligent about such things, I be using subcategories a lot more, and organizing those oversized categories into smaller chuncks. But even 100 or 200 entries is overly large for a page to load — especially if it’s being loaded dynamically, as I have MT set up to do on my archives.
Even before I shifted to dynamic publishing, I’d changed the archive pages to just show a 40-word excerpt from each post. And some of those archives still don’t load before MT times out.
Now, I think, I have the answer. Per this article in ProNet, I went over to the Everitz consulting page, which had a formal download for a template to do archive pagination with dynamic publication and Smarty — which, with consulting back to the DBD blog page here, let me actually implement the free solution (with some superficial tweaks).
I don’t have it in place here at DDtB yet — but will soon. And, in the meantime, I have it implemented over on Blog of Heroes, e.g., here in the Gameplay archive.
The only drawback to this approach is that you can’t do a visual scan of all the pages at once. But between this facility and the search box, it should be as possible as possible to find whatever it is you’re looking for here at DDtB — or, more likely, for me to find what I’m looking for.