How many archives should I show?

If you’ve been blogging for some time, then your archive list will be getting quite long.  I’ve been having that problem on some blogs, as the list of months in the archives was getting longer than the rest of the sidebar put together.

So I started wondering about how I could improve the situation.  I’ve come up with two possible solutions:

– use yearly archives instead of monthly ones

– limit the number of listed months

For blogs that have been going for a number of years, the yearly option is not bad, as long as the posts can still be found without going through too many pages.  I solve that using tag clouds or category lists.

But for most of my blogs, I’ve gone for the limited month option, and have set the limit to 12.

To do this, I’ve edited the sidebar.php and changed the call to wp_get_archives to

wp_get_archives(‘type=monthly&limit=12’);

or

wp_get_archives(‘type=yearly’);

Which do you think is the better option?  Of is there an even better way?