Indexing as organization and optimization

I like to think of “indexing” in a really general sense as “(pre-)organizing information for efficiency”. Efficiency can mean lots of things! It could be information throughout, e.g. latency. It could be for ease-of-writing (e.g. putting a bunch of stuff in one file because it’s easier to write that way, even though it could’ve been broken into multiple files). It could be for genericness (e.g. the opposite of putting everything in one file, and instead breaking it down super granularly so all info is available without any extra steps).

One example I’ve been mulling over for this site is making the info here more interactive or accessible, while keeping it easily-hostable.

It would be cool to “index” all my posts into a super-granular DB that people could query directly with some kinda UI—basically, on-demand information as dictated by a visitor. That would be a little less overwhelming to look at than the current state, and also provide a ton of flexibility. But it would also probably be more expensive and complicated to host (I think?), and require JS unless I did it all server-side.

In the other hand, I could “index” everything into all possible variations that someone ever might want to visit or look up, and then link/serve those files. That’s much more “static”, and probably super efficient on the deployment side of things, but would have a much larger storage footprint for the site itself.

No idea which would be better right now, but it’s fun to think of them as two ends of the same conceptual space.