One of the things I started dreading when I first started this blog again back in July 2008 is that eventually that archives ‘By Month’ list and categories list was going to get so long that it was going to be lopsided and lots of items really make the site look “longer” than it really was when it comes to the vertical scroll bars.

What I needed to do now since both the Archives and the Categories list was getting to long, I wanted to shorten them up, but still allowing the user (that’s you..) to be able to still be able to browse all the available archives months and categories without having to view the full archives view.

First 10 & Next 10

There was several primitive examples of how this could be done on the Steam Gaming Website. If you take a look at the compare picture I took of the site for a quick example. At the bottom of their New Releases tab/box they have ‘Next 10′.  Clicking on that ‘Next 10′ scrolls through the next ten items. That is exactly what I wanted to do. Problem… they didn’t use jQuery. Not wanting to go backwards in coding, Prototype is not my thing anymore. To bulky. I searched the net until I found something that was worthy of my attention.

The next thing I found was something called ‘jQuery Tools‘. Still part of the jQuery library, but maintained by a separate author than the jQuery group. This was exactly what I was looking for: Scrolling Vertical.

By reading the introduction and then going to the vertical demo page I was able to piece together what needed to be done in order for this to work on WordPress.