Table of Contents: Clever Looks, Clever Designs

Want the code for the Table of Contents shown above? Check out the Rounded Corner Index Code

In New Stone Soup's discussion, Make Yourself a Table of Contents , we looked at various reasons for every blogger to tack an index or two to every blog. We thought bloggers might find it useful to play the role of the voyeur: let's peek through the windows of other blogs, and see for ourselves the many different uses and designs that bloggers have found for indexes, and tables of contents.

Before we dust off our binoculars, New Stone Soup wants to point out the table of contents used here--not just on our blog, but at the top of this particular article post. We designed this table for another blog (and it took a fair amount of time, we don't mind adding), and already had the template at our fingertips--otherwise, we could have simplified the design to save precious NCAA basketball-watching time. We love the idea of a table of contents at the top of every post. You can use them for all sorts of wacky purposes. Here, we've used these options to link the reader to: a) New Stone Soup's earlier "Table of Contents" post; b) snapshots and walkthroughs of four tBlogs' use of tables of contents; c) a link to New Stone Soup's home page; and d) a surprise link to a trip down Amnesia Lane (line from Dead Poet's Society) that the reader will have to click to discover.

But you can use an index at the top of a post to do anything you want. If you have a long post, you can link to various places WITHIN your post. If you have other, related posts, you can link to various places within your blog. And you can make the index look anyway you want--even a simple list of links will do the trick.