Reading the archive

Three pages the build writes for you, all from the posts themselves -- there is nothing to configure and nothing to keep up to date.

/archive/ is a map of the site in two levels. The first is a row per year with a strip of twelve months, each month shaded by how much was written in it; the second, /archive/<year>/, is one line per post, grouped by month, oldest first. No excerpts and no pictures: this is an index, and its whole point is that twenty years fit on one screen. Pagination cannot do that -- it is anchored to the oldest post, so /page/128/ says nothing about whether it holds 2009 or 2014. Every post's date badge links into the month it belongs to, so a reader who finds one post can see what surrounded it.

Under the map a legend says what the shading means -- the four steps between "less" and "more", in the map's own colours. A year's page opens with that year's row of the map again, behind the words "jump to a month": a month with posts is a link to its section further down the page, shaded as it is on the map.

A year nobody wrote in gets a row on the map and no page of its own: an empty page is an invitation to a dead end. A post is filed under the year of its ADDRESS, so /archive/2025/ and /posts/2025/ always agree.

/tag/ is every tag the site has, as pills, with a superscript count of how often each was used. It is built alphabetically -- folded, so an accented name sorts where a reader expects rather than after z -- and a reader can switch it to by-count, which is remembered for next time. Only tags that have a page of their own appear, so the list never points at an address the build did not write. Above the list a row of letters -- the ones that have tags under them -- jumps to each letter's band; by-count order has no bands, so the row is put away while that order is shown.

/series/ is every series the site has, a line each: the name, how many parts, and the years they span. The one still being written comes first -- the order is by the newest part. A series is listed once it has a page of its own, which is once it has two published parts, and the name in a series' own heading leads back here, as a tag's leads to /tag/. A site with no series has no such page.

None of the three needs a menu item to work, but nav: in site.yml is where you would put one; see Configuration in the README.

A picture post's card carries the picture. A card in a listing is cut by height, and it keeps its first block whatever that weighs -- so a photograph under one line of words used to be left off the card of a post that is that photograph. For a post whose kind is image or video (the icon in its date badge says which) the medium now goes first and the cut runs over what follows. A medium taller than it is wide is held to a height rather than given a screen to itself. An article with a photograph in it is still an article, and its card is cut as it always was.