My Archives, They're Alive!
First, check it out and if you likey, go to the rss_live_archive plugin page for the download.
As I was finishing on work on my Textpattern Live Search plugin, I was checking out Michael Heilemann’s beautiful site, Binary Bonsai to see his nice implementation of live searching for Wordpress. That same day Michael had just posted Live Archives in Effect on his site. The live archive concept is a great solution for a problem I’ve been asked about several times….whats the best way to present a large archive without having 1 long list?
The Building Blocks
The live archive on Binary Bonsai is created using Jonas Rabbe’s Super Archives Plugin for Wordpress which Jonas created in response to Micheal’s idea of a digging archive system.
Since Jonas used my plugin name, I figured I would check out his code and see what I could use for Textpattern. The result is the rss_live_archive plugin.
The plugin is heavily based on Jonas’ work so thanks goes to him most of all. The plugin is also based on Jeff Minard’s writing on Live Request: XMLHttpRequest and You and the BitFlux LiveSearch Solution.
Some History
The first version of the plugin that I’m releasing is 0.4. This is not only done to confuse people but because there actually have been 3 other versions that have been sent to some very helpful people for testing. My paltry 100 article archive didn’t provide much of a test so Alicson and her 700+ posts along with Pete and his ~1000 posts came to the rescue.
The rss_live_archive plugin went through several iterations including a complete rewrite to add caching as Jonas had implemented in his Super Archives plugin. So a few weeks later I decided to stick with the version 0.4 that the plugin had progressed to.
In Action
You can check out Pete’s Live Archive (which is super speedy even with nearly 1000 posts) and Alicson’s Live Archive to see some other examples of the plugin in use.
You can also check it out here at wilshire|one and then go to the rss_live_archive plugin page for the download.
Comments
27. May 2005
thank you so much. this is working great on my website and putting it together was very easy.
27. May 2005
I’m really liking this plugin and how it’s working. Very nice to use.
Disabled JS though, and the page is just blank :-( Javascript sould enhance, not be another crutch.
I would put a normal archives in there, and hide it with JS. This way if JS is off, disabled, fails, whatever, there is a regular fall back.
1. June 2005
Christ, Rob, you’re a genius! This has got to be the best TXP plugin yet.
I’m going to decide whether or not to use this on my current blog… But it would be cool for my upcoming photoblog! ;)
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