Some site home improvement here at Population Statistic:

Many weeks after mentioning it, I’ve just installed Scriptygoddess’ wpPaginate plugin for WordPress.

Basically, this plugin breaks up the output of a long list of archived posts into several pages, instead of loading them all into one long browser page. It might not seem like a big deal, considering the capacity of the Web. But when you blog as much as I do, the backlog fills up pretty quickly, and clicking on a category archive like Pop Culture spits back almost a hundred posts. If you do a search for a term, like “computer”, it’s even more acute.

That’s a big load o’ content to load up into a single browser window. Even if you’re on a broadband connection and a high-powered computer, there’s a risk of having the whole thing time-out on you. Aside from that, it’s less than ideal to visually scan through such a long webpage, even if you’re using the browser’s document find function.

So pagination is the solution. That huge page of posts gets divided into several separate pages, navigatable through a simple list of hyperlinked page numbers at the header and footer of each page. It’s a fairly elegant solution.

The installation of the plugin was without incident — easily the smoothest such procedure I’ve ever managed with WordPress (smoother even than the show-hide plugin, also from Scriptygoddess). Since I can’t write my own plugins, I’m glad I’ve got a resource like Scriptygoddess to turn to. A big thanks to Jennifer for her time and effort!

I’m planning on at least one other plugin install shortly. Hopefully, it’ll be as painfree and satisfying as this one.