Blog archives are back

In my latest round of struggling to get Community Server to behave the way I'd like it to, I've added the month-by-month archive links on the right.  So you can now easily navigate my posts dating all the way back to April 2003.  (Hmmm... 2004 was a quiet year!)

It turns out that I had to change my blog's skin in order to get the Archives section (and then redo my customizations to the skin).  It's wrong (IMHO) that so much of the functionality is tied to individual skins.  I should be able to select what sections I want on the page regardless of the look and feel!  But at least now I've got the site mostly behaving like I want it to.  (If only it were possible to hide or change that useless "Navigation" section that plagues all MSDN blogs…)

Although Community Server (like all software) isn't perfect, I do have to appreciate how far we've come since https://blogs.gotdotnet.com first started!  When I was doing those original posts in 2003, there were only 5 of us bloggers hosted by Microsoft: Brad Abrams, Chris Brumme, Ed Kaim, Sara Williams, and me.  We had to post to the server using an early version of BlogX.  Now that was painful!