why blog pagination URL structure needs restructuring

The most popular convention on how to represent a blog pagination URL is that the home page is page 1. These are the latest, let’s say, 10 articles. Then you have page 2, where the next 10 most recent articles appear. It sounds reasonable, but it’s quite impractical.

The reason is simple. Every time you publish a new article, ALL “pages” change content. The last article of page 1 goes to page 2. The last article of page 2 goes to page 3, etc. For example, as soon as I publish this blog post, the contents of http://vrypan.net/log/page/2/ will change -and the same will happen to pages 3, 4, 5,.., 44.

As a result:
- indexing any URL that indicated pagination is useless for search engines.
- if you are using some kind of caching engine, you have to re-create all “pages”, whenever a new post is published!

The funny thing? No matter what number I assign to the page containing the very first 10 posts of the blog, I wrote back in 2004, their has been the same for 6 years now, and will continue to be the same for as long as my blog exists (unless I decide to delete one of the first 10 posts). So, why not make this page, page #1?

The way I see it, the very first post of your blog should be on page #1. The last ones on, let’s say, page #100. As you add posts, the pages increment. But the older pages don’t change.

This would cause only one inconsistency: if you have 23 posts, with 10 posts per page, on the home page you will present posts 14-23. Page #1 has 1-10, page #2 11-20, #3 21-23. This makes it impractical to have the usual “older entries” link at the homepage. This link (obviously, no home page has a “newer entries” link :-) should be replaced by an “archive” link or something like that.

In short: a blog is read in reverse chronological order, but its archive should be numbered like a book, in chronological order.. Yes, if you want to know the end, you go to the last page, we’ve been doing this for centuries. This would solve some important problems, and wouldn’t create any new ones, IFAIK.

One Response to why blog pagination URL structure needs restructuring

  1. lexx27 says:
    2011-10-19 at 01:10

    #1

    lets test livefyre

    #2

    Your thoughts are interesting on this one.

    The inconsistency you mention could be avoided if the pagination is not related to offset but on real dates too…

    real dates are permanent, offset will change somehow even in chronological order . So maybe pagination is not the solution for consistency. date based url structure will do the job .

    I will come back to that soon :)