One of the powerful features of most blogs is the work the blog system does, in the background without your ever being much aware of it, to keep things nice and organized for you. So think of archiving as keep things organized. Every time you post you give give your post a title, and a body, and you associate your post with at least one category (and hopefully at least one tag)--really a very simple process. In fact, it's just as easy as sending an email!

But the blogging system is adding extra information to your post for you. It knows who you are based on how you logged in, so the system assigns your name as the author: Post by: Tim Tyson. It also looked at the clock on your computer to get the date and time you published your post and saved that information with the post too: Posted by: Tim Tyson on June 19, 2007, at 9:31PM. The blogging system then files all of this away neatly for you and your visitors.

So when a reader clicks on the June, 2007, archive link in the sidebar, the blogging system knows to bring up that post that was posted by: Tim Tyson on June 19, 2007, at 9:31PM, and all of the other posts with a publication date in the month of June, 2007. This is part of the archiving process that makes blogging systems so popular. Archives keep things neatly organized! There are usually three types of archives created by most blogging systems:

• Date-based
• Category-based
• Individual Entry-based

Each entry is automatically filed away in each of these areas. I just explained the date-based archive in the paragraph above. Now let's look at the category-based archive. If you associated a post you published back in 2005 with a "Curriculum" category and a reader clicks on the "Curriculum" archive link today, your post from 2005 will be included in the list of all of the posts you ever assigned to the "curriculum" category. The blog never forgets. It never loses your post. It always knows where to find things!

The last type of archive is individual-entry-based. It's just that--a link to one individual entry. It is a permanent link that never changes and only applies to that one single post. Each post you publish is assigned this permalink. You can learn more about the permalink by clicking on this link (which is the permalink for the post about the permalink!). The permalink is an individual entry-based archive. It is a permanent link to an individual entry you have published. When you clicked on the "Curriculum" category archive link mentioned in the paragraph above, you got a complete list of all of the posts in that category. Each title in the list is a link to that single entry. If you click on the title (a permalink), you go to that individual entry. You can use these individual entry-based archive permalinks (now that was a mouthful) in a variety of ways discussed in this post on permalinks.