Pagination for The Blog as Collections and a Temporal View

Overview of The Blog's Pagination Issue

Since the beginning of vanderwal.net I kept the blog post in a monthly view and did the navigation for them as prior month, but the downside was there have been months where I haven't posted. This lead to broken-ish pagination with many months only having a "Prior Month" link on the page.

One solution, is just create the links to prior months with content. This could work, but it would need a mapping of months in a year to show what would have no content, hence the skipping. This isn't unreasonable and it is easily doable.

This leads to the second problem area, which is the converse of nothing in a month, but having a large collection of posts per months is the other end of the spectrum. To solve for this there are two decent paths:

  1. Have table of contents in the sidebar to jump to posts and time that are within that month
  2. Build consistent collections or chapters with the oldest starting with one (or in this case 172 as the database starts there, with the prior posts in static pages that aren't in the database)

I like the static collections with a consistent length, say 15 to 25 blog posts in each. This could keep the PHP ending or be completely static (should any post be updated the collection could easily be recreated and would only need one collection to be processed).

Next Step Option - Update 14 June 2026

I am taking the collections route as the option I want to embrace.

I'm looking at having collection pages with the earliest posts in Collection 1 (this first collection would not be a full 20 posts, but would get to the first full 20 post collection being 180 to 199. From there in "Collection 2" it would be 20 post.

This change would need a heading change, where a heading would have: Collection number, Post range (180 to 199), and the date range covered for the posts in that collection. As of today 1,980 that would be in the collections. This means as of today there would be 99 collections.

Further Impacts

This will need a navigation pattern and visual design to help see date ranges in the collection page. The individual post should have a "Show Post in Its Collection", which means there may need tracking of collections added to the database for ease of creation getting to the collection.

Starting Page Changes in the Lab - Update 5 July 2026

A test "collection page" is in place to work through the collection page elements and is at Pagination Test 1. The collection navigation with the four elements: 1) Collection number; 2) Range of posts in the collection; 3) Number of the posts in the collection; Date range for the collection. There should be 20 posts in nearly all collections, but have have fewer for various reasons (mostly tests and duplicate anomalies).

The at the bottom of the post section there is a collection footer above the footer. This collection footer contains links to the previous and next collections (if there is one) and the linked collection number. There are two other pieces that will be in this collection footer: 1) A more robust collection navigation; 2) A date range collection navigation method.

The database updates have started, but not completed yet, but that could be soon.