A few weeks back I wrote about how the archive page on this website - an index of all my writing - have been acting inconsistent and (sometimes) nonexistent. An inquiry to Squarespace support got me nowhere. Basically it’s a known quirk, and practically speaking it will not be fixed. Support said I have too much content for that indexing function. Mind you I pay over two hundred dollars a year to Squarespace to host this website! A paid product should not be broken on any of its functions.
Nevertheless, it was up to me to act. I can either switch to another website host, or switch to the newer 7.1 templates. Both options require an immense amount of work: I practically have to piece-meal transfer over the entire lot of my content. Doable, given a long enough timeframe, but not ideal given my other time commitments. I would need about two weeks of nothing else to concentrate on that sort of project.
It seems tedium is not to be avoided, however. The solution I arrived at is rather simple on paper: do my own indexing. No more relying on Squarespace’s module to fetch the content. Instead I shall manually construct the archive. By going to every piece I’ve ever written on here, copy the title and hyperlink, then paste them onto the page. With some 500 individual posts to copy and link, the process was going to be slow.
And it took the better part of last weekend to accomplish the transition. The archive page is finally looking how I want it to be. Like the carpenter who sands and paints the back of the cabinet, every little detail matters! Of course, for any new post I write henceforth, I have to manually add it to the index. Minor labor that’s worth trading for an archive page that will load properly each and every time.
Every detail matters.