Here at Perishable Press, the number of posts listed in my archives is rapidly approaching the 700 mark. While this is good news in general, displaying such a large number of posts in an effective, user-friendly fashion continues to prove challenging. Unfortunately, my current strategy of simply dumping all posts into an unordered list just isn’t working. I think it’s fair to say that archive lists containing more than like 50 or 100 post titles are effectively useless and nothing more than a usability nightmare. With growing numbers of blogs building up massive collections of posts, finding better ways to display vast quantities of archived material becomes increasingly important.

One solution that seems popular involves breaking the archives down into various categories, tags, and time periods. This provides meta-context to each list of titles and usually eliminates the need for any hideously long post listings. This solution works well, especially when the different category lists are displayed adjacently in multiple vertical columns. For example, a blog with three categories would do well to display each category’s archive listings in its own vertical column. Something like this:

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It has occurred to me lately that I no longer use Google Analytics for Perishable Press. Instead, I find myself keeping an eye on things using Mint almost exclusively. So, the question now is: do I continue serving the GA JavaScript to keep the profile active just in case I ever need the additional stats? I mean, Mint already does a great job at recording all of information I could ever need, so I no longer see the use for Google Analytics. I do wonder, however, if Google ranks GA-enabled sites a bit higher than non-GA sites. Hmmm.. it seems to me that there are several options going forward..

Option 1: Continue with Google Analytics

The easiest thing for me to do at this point would be to just leave it alone: continue serving the extra 6.3K/21.4K GA JavaScript (i.e., urchin.js) to site visitors. Sure, I may never actually use the volumes of data I am collecting via Analytics, but hey, who cares, right? Of course, delivering the urchin.js file requires bandwidth and other server resources, and also tends to slow things down a bit, especially on those rare occasions when the Google server bogs down.

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A great to way to share your PHP code with visitors is to display it directly in the browser with automatically generated syntax highlighting. Here is a screenshot showing an example of syntax-highlighted PHP code:

Displaying your PHP scripts in syntax-highlighted form is an excellent way to share source code details directly with your readers. Rather than zipping the script and requiring users to download, unzip, and open the file in an editor, displaying your code directly saves you and your visitors time, effort, and hassle. Plus, in my opinion, looking at syntax-highlighted PHP code is a beautiful sight, day or night ;)

In this article, we will explore 5 different ways to display the syntax-highlighted source of your PHP scripts. Three of the methods are designed to highlight entire files, and the other two are aimed directly at highlighting individual strings of PHP code. All of these methods employ PHP’s built-in syntax highlighter.

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