An interesting howto on kottke.org:
most weblogs’ archive pages are pretty useless, mine included. They should help people discover and find the non-current posts on a site and a list of links to each month’s worth of posts isn’t that helpful. The categories are more helpful, but it’s still a lot of clicking around. The jury is still out on tag clouds. Two current archive page favorites are Binary Bonsai’s (Live Archives section, lists of latest entries, most commented on, personal favorites) and Subtraction’s (category descriptions, # of posts in each archive, list of post titles for each of the last few months). Like I said above, my goal is to get rid of the archive page altogether.

