It just dawned on me that I never wrote anything on the rewrite of my phlog. So, as per my statements on here several times, I am anti-archive. I do not think breaking people's refs to your phlog is the correct thing to do. Yet... I really like the look of phlogs that do archive.
My phlog engine, PDD (Phlog Disgourgement Display) uses ls -lAnrv (no v on the sdf version) to list the phlog entries. (this is a simplification, the output of ls is piped to sed and awk and head, but you get the idea) So the solution is as easy as:
ls -lAnrv $QUERY_STRING*.md
Then a few for loops in the script to create links to the "archives" based upon the known starting date and the current date. A ?YYYY[MM] is appended to the path in the gopher links for these. The thought process was: you do not create new database tables and move rows around everytime you want to view data a different way, you create a view. So references remain intact and I get the look and functionality I desired.