making a list of my posts available
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Just one more tip here. What you all are talking about is called a “Site Map”. It is a traditional page listing all the posts, sorted by date, category (preferred), and/or tag. It may even feature a tag cloud. It is the “table of contents” of your blog.
It can easily be created using the Pages feature, as described. Many people automatically look for a Site Map rather than some of the other titles you have come up with, and they recognize it as the blog or site’s table of contents.
You can all it anything you want, but if you want it to be found, Site Map is the traditional title.
And I’m with you all on wishing there was an easier way to add a site map to our blogs – or at least export titles by categories only. SIGH. :D
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I would also like to see site maps introduced.
britgirl moved from wordpress.com. She now has a blog host and a wordpress.org copy of the Freshy theme. She’s using at sitemap plug-in by dagondesign.com. This is what her sitemap looks like http://thebritgirl.com/sitemap/
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judy, lorelle and timethief, shortextract, and ryannejen,
I have attempted to do what you have all suggested 3 different times (with 5-6 posts each time and the process is not working for me. I so look forward to a widget or something from the staff at wordpress so that I can set up my own site map. If anyone on staff is working on such a widget at WordPress.com, please let me know. Thank you.Craig
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I followed pretty much exactly these steps in setting up a manually-generated sitemap. In my case the posts are listed by date, with each year to one subpage of my sitemap.
The information is accessed via an orientation page (sitemap guide) which I call ‘explore’. Following Lorelle’s comment, maybe I should simply call that page ‘sitemap’.
I’ll consider a change there, but meanwhile in setting up my site architecture, I also took the small additional step of manually tagging my posts by date.
I use ‘2005, 2006, 2007’ etc., which is sufficient for my posting rate, but you might use ‘2007_03, 2007_04, 2007_05’ etc. if you post more often. You just need some sort of numerical system here so that the categories will order properly.
The key advantage of this approach is that, once set up, you can dispense with the ‘Archives’ widget altogether, since the category list (or tag cloud) now effectively provides that function for you. For a large site, that saves a huge amount of space and complexity on your sidebar.
It does take a little while to list out all the posts like this, and of course you have to update your sitemap page each time you post (here I see that I’m a post behind, tsk tsk) or even if you edit a post title later on.
With some knowhow, it might be possible to avoid that work – Chris Pearson at http://pearsonified.com provides instructions on how to generate an automatic xhtml sitemap – but I’m not sure if that works in WordPress.com yet.
Nevertheless, his site is still a great source of ideas, amongst them his ‘Cutline’ theme where the simple top menu design makes it very easy to move pages around.
As a final suggestion for ‘hooking onto’ your readers, you might consider the experiment of listing a couple of ‘related articles’ at the end of each new post you make.
These could be links to your own work on similar or connected themes, or other links to relevant external references.
That kind of signposting is only a plan for me as yet, but meanwhile you could take a look at davidairey.com or lorelle’s site to see how those two experts make that idea work to great effect.
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“judy, lorelle and timethief, shortextract, and ryannejen,
I have attempted to do what you have all suggested 3 different times (with 5-6 posts each time and the process is not working for me.”When you say the process is not working, what exactly isn’t working?
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secondchancetolive:
I’ve now corrected and renamed my index pages as ‘sitemap’ to provide a full and ordered list of posts on my site pretty much exactly as you wanted to achieve, I think.In addition, I’ve also now used tigredefogo’s method to let Google to verify my site and to add a Google Sitemap, too. I’d been looking in vain for a way to do this for some time.
The result was that Google immediately indexed some new pages which it had mysteriously missed before.
Here are the tutorials from tigredofogo:
http://tigredefogo.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/tutorial-google-sitemap-solution-for-wordpresscom-blog/
Many thanks, then, to engtech for showing how it can be done, and to tigredefogo for mentioning it here and making it simple.
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