When WordPress 2.7 and its new and optimized user interface came, I thought there was still room for improvements: a horizontal menu gave the admin area more of a “desktop application” feel, and I think it’s superior to a vertical menu. So I updated the Worpdress Admin Drop Down Menu.

One cool feature is a color picker that allows you to customize the colorization of the menu bar. I’m not a huge fan of the gradient that’s auto-applied, which looks too exaggerated, but that’s probably nitpicking a little, I suppose.

The plugin works in most modern browsers, and Internet Explorer too. (I kid, I kid…)

Anyway, if you don’t like the vertical nav, this plugin is for you.

Not everyone has read everyone of your posts as they came out, and people often want to return to pages they’d read before.

Date-based archives aren’t any help. They may be the least-useful of blog navigation techniques. Sure, there may be times when you want to see the posts from a specific month, but not very often.

Search forms are great, possibly the best navigation method used on blogs today, but you have to know what so search before it’s of any use.

Then you have tags and categories, which have their uses, but are just another way to sort data. You need to have tags and/or categories on your blog. They help people find what they’re looking for, though if you have 3+ years of posts in your archives, it may still take awhile to find the posts worth reading.

The posts worth reading…

Essentially, you want a place to highlight your best work, the posts that everyone should read. While you obviously still have a lot of good stuff in your archives, to be unearthed by readers when they need it, this page would have the posts you want everyone to see right away.

Thinking about this, I ended up building my Featured Posts page, which is essentially a yearly archive of a “Featured” category I use for this purpose. Here’s how to set it up.

My Featured Posts scheme helps, but it’s not the ultimate answer. It’s just one piece of the blog navigation puzzle.