Creating an at-a-glance weblog archive index

Pro2sum outputs titles and opening lines for any weblog page that has been set up to include "id" attributes as specified for its companion program Pro2rss. Simply submit the URL, and the program returns the title and the opening lines of the description for each entry in the weblog. What this means is that, once you've set up your weblog template file as described in the instructions for Pro2rss, you can easily create a user-friendly archive index, as well as having a reliable RSS feed.

This makes it very easy to create and maintain at-a-glance weblog index pages — for example the June 2002 archive page for the Loosely Coupled weblog. All that's required to update this page each week is to:

1. Enter the URL for that week's weblog into the Pro2sum form and then press the "Create summary" button
2. Select "view source" from the browser menu and locate the code for the summary (marked with the comment "<!-- SUMMARY STARTS HERE -->")
3. Copy the summary and paste it into your index file
4. Upload the updated index file to your server