If your blog is over a year or two old, you may have noticed the list of archive pages is getting unwieldy.
This plugin is a widget that compresses the size of the arcgives list to two lines per year (three if the lines are narrow) rather than one line per per month.
More information
This widget is licensed under GPLv3.
Grateful thanks to Alan Morgan whose widget_archives2 I used as a template.
Potential developers should check out the development history.
Finally, an obligatory plug for my blog, OddThinking.
Screenshots
This is an example of a compact monthly archive. In this theme, white is a link that hasn't been visited. Light blue is a link that has been visited, and the greyish blue is a month with no articles, and hence has no link. You may choose your own colour-scheme.