My focus the last few weeks has been cleaning up exactly how the quotes will be handled in the archives and how to best relay that information to the user. Typically my work is designed for people who I don't have the slightest clue what they'll want day to day, but here it's a tad different. Far as I see it we have three user groups, those who are just keeping up with quotes, those in wholesale archive binges working through the archives and those that use the specialized pages to check quotes at more or less random. Which leaves me with very different requirements than the free form style I'm used to.

What I'm thinking is rather simple, a filter set with three selections Tag, Year and Month. Technically Year and month would function as a single selection, defining months like the current archive structure does to limit server overhead. However, knowing the current filter selections would make it very simple for me to allow for jumping from one month to the next while making it perfectly clear what has been done. I've already discussed the tag selection, but if you only wanted to see one particular variety of quote as defined by the tags you could select it along with the month and year and cruise right along.

My other options for the filter selections are either far more complicated or less user friendly. I will be looking into multiple tag selection in terms of performance(I have something that works in theory, practice is a different beast) in the future. The less friendly part would be allowing for user defined date ranges, if for some reason you had a desire to select random days, weeks, months or hours out of the archives of FSTDT, I could totally make that happen. But I wouldn't be able to do any of the nicer "Here's your next set of archives" functionality as the selections allowed would be arbitrary. Call me on it if you think I'm wrong.

But, all said, when you first reach a page from the site index it will have no date selected, so it will show a page with the most recent records for the given tags(or no tags at all) and the dates will only be assigned on the second page you navigate to. So, no more blank of the month. I just need to figure out how to keep from repeating quotes on the second page during the month cross over.

So I'm rather happy with that and will be pounding on the functionality this weekend. But I've had one other thought, would people be interested in a "You where here" link that takes them back to the same place they were viewing in the archives, setting either something at the account level that lets you jump back to place, or generate a copyable link to do the same?