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How To Read This Blog
Chicago Boyz has been around for many years and has thousands of archived posts. Quite a few of these old posts and the reader comments that go with them are still worth reading. Unfortunately, the limitations of blogging software with its journal format and no table of contents or index can make it difficult to find the best of our archived posts. Here are a few suggestions to make the task easier.
First, the blog’s right sidebar has a list of links to “Recent Posts” that displays the titles of the ten latest posts.
Second, just above the recent-posts list there is a list of links to “Notable Discussions” that provides a small and incomplete selection of the very most popular and/or interesting discussion threads from over the years.
Third, note the list of Chicago Boyz authors, also on the right sidebar and just above the notable-discussions links. Many of these authors are not currently active. However, we maintain this list not merely to credit our authors but also to provide quick access to their respective posts. If you like a particular Chicago Boyz author’s work you can click on his name and browse his personal post archive.
Fourth, there is a Google search window near the top of the blog under the Chicago Boyz header. This window is configured to search the Chicago Boyz archive by default. It works very well if you search on a topic, post title or relevant phrase. (Note that if you want to perform a second search you should return to the blog’s home page and search again from there. Otherwise, if you search using the Google window in the search results, you will search the entire Internet and thus your search results will not be very helpful.)
Finally, if all else fails scroll down our right sidebar for a list of post categories, and below that a list of links to Chicago Boyz monthly archives going back to 2003. Our categorization is imperfect and many older posts aren’t categorized at all, but in some cases categorization can help to narrow a search enough to find what you’re looking for. The same is true for the monthly chronological archive links.
If you have any ideas about how we could improve this blog, feel free to share them in the comments.
10 thoughts on “How To Read This Blog”
October 26, 2014 at 10:08 am
You are spot on that there is a lot of great stuff here. What leaps to my mind among many others are the America 3.0 discussions and Trent’s fantastic WW2 analysis of the Pacific theater.
Over at LITGM it is funny I just gave up on that and put the 5 most popular posts up in the sidebar and got rid of the categories. At least you are taking on the challenge here.
I was thinking of putting my “25 stories about work” into an e book when I’m done and just giving it away on Amazon as a freebie. Or maybe charging a nominal 99 cents, which means that I will make back about 5 bucks ha ha.
I think to some extent putting these posts into some sort of ebook / ibook form if they are organized is another way to build a combined narrative. I’d surely contribute / pay for something like what Trent has done in ebook form.
Then you have the ideas coalescing into printed books like America 3.0. That is a great achievement!
It is good that you are thinking of this topic but a lot of the solutions that you are looking for are to some extent in consolidation of related topics and moving into adjacent areas.
As far as the links and screen estate and authors and categories… that is really hard. I don’t know what to do about that. It takes up screen real estate and I don’t know if people use them or not. But it is all we have and your call for bringing back best posts of the past is very relevant.
I should do something like that on energy and taxation at some time, but I also run out of time overall as we all do.