How to use the blog archive

The chief cartoonist called the Blog's office last night and left a message in the editor's voice mail. I had asked him to consider doing a cartoon based on a photo of the location of the proposed Center for Business and Education that I posted last week. He sounded dazed and confused. He couldn't find it, he said. His voice had an edge to it. I recognized the tone. It was the same as my father's when he was trying to figure out how to program his VCR a decade or two ago.

"I have scrolled down through all the pictures and it is not there," he said. "It's simply not there, or not on my computer, anyway."

I shouldn't be annoyed. If I had not made a deliberate effort to keep up when the personal computer first hit the scene, I'd probably be in the same technologically challenged boat. My kids were little at the time. I didn't want them to know how to do something I didn't.

I have seen evidence that others of my regular readers don't fully understand how to use the Blog. Stuff seems to keep disappearing, they tell me. Well, since this blog is pretty standard, I figure that if explain how to use it, I will be doing bloggers everywhere a favor.

The trick is to realize that the sidebar is not just window dressing. In addition to all the links and gadgets, there is the means to access all the posts that have scrolled off the screen. It's called the "blog archive." If the cartoonist had looked in the archive for July, he would have found a listing for a post called "Another Angle: the Center for Business and Education," posted eight days ago on July 3. Since the Blog averages about three posts-a-day, and I have it set to display ten posts at a time, the entry had long ago disappeared down the bottom of the screen and somewhere into the chief cartoonist's computer.

The archive shows links to all the posts for the current month. For past months in the current year, it displays a link to all the posts for that month. It works similarly for past years. Another way to locate a post is, if you know its label, such as "another angle," you can enter it in the search bar at the top left of the screen and all posts with the same label will be displayed.

All this, of course, ignores the fact that, if the chief cartoonist checked the Blog more often, or got right to work when the editor asked him to, going into the archives would not have been necessary. By the way, I have no fear that he will ever read this, as I fully expect it to have scrolled off the screen by the next time he checks in here.