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It's all spinning wheels and self-doubt until the first pot of coffee.

date-based pagination

Here's a small idea I've not yet had the chance to try out on a large scale: Time-based pagination in lieu of page-number-based pagination for personal content - ie. blogs, bookmarks, status updates, etc. (You know, User Generated Content except I dislike the term.)

Page numbers change over time, while time-based URLs are stable. Most people don't generate an unreasonable amount of stuff in a day, so a page-per-day might not be so bad. But, if there's too much stuff, degenerate to a page-per-12-hours or whatnot.

Delicious used to have something like this in the web UI, back in the mists of 2003 or so, but Joshua got rid of it after a few design iterations. The Delicious API is still somewhat based on it, which causes some confusion—but I tend to like it, thus this post.

Archived Comments

  • You mean, like the date-based archives that Movable Type has had for ages?

    Yeah, I like those.

  • I've had the same idea for Upcoming, for obvious reasons... our SRP pagination would then be permalinks.

  • Actually, yeah, we built the default pagination for archives in MT4 to be category-by-month, for exactly this reason. I regularly see "?page=2" in URLs and it just seems like such an obvious, avoidable mistake for so many to have embraced. SEO aside, permalinks that are destined to expire over time seem pretty reader-hostile, too.