making an index of things in blog

What are you trying to accomplish with such a feature? If you tell us what your end result hope is, perhaps we can point you in some direction.
Regards

If you mean an archives with all posts categorized, and arranged and all that, search google for “WordPress nicer archives narchives.php”

Indexes – true indexes – are difficult, time-consuming things to produce, and basically have to be done by hand. Indexes in books are either laboriously compiled by the authors or by professional indexers.
I’m just saying it’s impossible to automate. At the very least, a human agent is needed to discern what the signifcant words and phrases are, and to specify which words are synonyms, which are headings, which are subheadings…
Although if someone could write a plugin that could do it – maybe by allowing the user to manually enter an array of “index worthy” words and phrases for their blog, and then searching for those words and compiling them together into an index-like list – that would be really cool. But I’m pretty sure that doesn’t exist. Anybody?

Davos has created a post-specific table of contents plugin: https://www.puffy.nu/~davos/pages/code/wp-toc
Perhaps that code could be the foundation, or, to quote Clueless, “a jumping-off point for negotiations”? ??

Thanks for the replies. To amplify: I use my WP blog as a “system diary” to note what I did where on this system.
I have posted a number of newsgroups on this and I get zip for answers, but this is what I mean:
I have a box with a number of Debian Linux partitions (6 or 7, I lose count). No MS windows. I use them to try out things and I will jump from one to the other.
The problem is “Where was I on such and such a date and what did I do” or “I have done that before”.
I have tried flat files for that and that’s no good. They sit on a partition. I have 6 notebooks crammed full of stuff: I have to look through my scribblings? With WP the record is on the server (which is on the box also) and it is a diary. But in order to know “how have I solved that” I still need to look for the post, an index would be better.
Ideally I would print out the whole diary every week and then just look in the index and have the info.
To give an example: I am downloading the Debian kernel source of 2.6.9. I want to see if the multi-seat Linux patch fits. I have done that before. When? I remember it did not fit, but why not?

DISCLAIMER: I’m a complete recently slightly self-taught novice. I haven’t tried this, and it may be ridiculous. If it is, I’d appreciate if somebody could point it out so that I may learn.
Could you use the “$orderby” variable? In some combination with some sort of GET?
In index.php, before the line require('./wp-blog-header.php');, you could put something like:
if ($_GET[displayindex]) {
$orderby="title";
}
And then, later, before the loop you could have:
if ($_GET[displayindex]) { ?>

<?php foreach ($posts as $post) : start_wp(); ?>
• " rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link: <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?> from <?php the_date(); ?>

<?php endforeach; ?>

<?php } else { (and then your normal loop in here)}
Then, to show the index, you just call index.php with
index.php?displayindex=1
It wouldn’t be pretty, but it might be a start. And it assumes that your post titles are sensible and helpful. And you’d have to set it so that it displays all the entries, but I can’t remember how to do that. Anybody?

That’s a good idea, but in my case it won’t work because the posts have no titles. Here:
https://esquipulas.homeunix.com/
The reason is (was) that I just want a day by day record and instead all posts go under the category of the partition where I am presently at.
So today I am on hdb2 and thus my posts are all filed under that category, w/o title.
What was mentioned in a reply is very true: indexes are created by hand, and when you do it well, you have a good index, which is a lot of work. If not, it becomes meaningless. Due to the labor most books nowadays have poor indexes.

This is what I did:
I use hyperlatex https://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/search_packages.pl?keywords=hyperlatex&searchon=names&subword=1&version=all&release=all
to create the index.
I have to pick items out of each post to index them and put them into index.tex which then is processed by hyperlatex. It creates index.html and that is a link in my blog. So if I do all the work, selecting “index” will show an alphabetical index of all important topics in all posts.
Hyperlatex does the sorting and the showing of items in alphabetical order, etc. I just have to pick.
Too bad: it _would_ be nice if I could show the indexed item highlighted in the post. Being one of the clueless, I don’t know how to do that…