52

Facundo Olano muses about Web anthologies & non-chronological indexes for personal websites, even suggesting a potential new standard page (/best or /⭐). Indeed, I see a candidate for a pattern of personal websites that have reached a certain size.

Some differentiation might be necessary: the best pieces, those that took the most work, the ones the author likes the particularly, and the most popular pieces are not necessarily the identical.

Also, you need to have a produced certain number of articles for this to really add value (and solve an actual problem). A dozen headlines can be easily skimmed without further navigational assitance. But if a site published multiple articles a month sustained over a years, or decades even, the picture chagnes. I don't know what the lower threshold would be, but at some point an explicit act of curation would be a useful enhancement for the overall navigation, as the path become clearer with distance traveled (and as they say: hindsight is 20/20). This question could be approached empirically: collect a sample of sites that do this, and calculate the ratio of their selected works over the size of their whole archive.