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Stop Blogging.

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18 pointsjnunemaker7 comments

This is becoming a serious problem in some areas.

For example, the amount of help available for Ubuntu on the web is wonderful; however, the number of out of date pages is enormous. A few days ago I was trying to fix a problem with the NTP setup on my Ubuntu machine. I found it quite difficult to get current, correct information.

The solution given in this article is okay for them. On the other hand, blog or not, you can't expect the average helpful person who posts some info to maintain that info forever.

So: what to do about this?

"I found it quite difficult to get current, correct information."

OTOH, having information in a clearly dated format, like a blog, is helpful in letting you know when information might be out of date. Publishing information with less clearly marked dates won't make information more correct, it'll just leave us with fewer clues when trying to evaluate it.

Totally agree. I use blogs to document stuff at work for this reason. You can't rely on people frequently going back to increasing numbers of old documents to update them, so you must leave clues for the reader as to what the context was when the article was written. Date is a really important part of that.

Linux is notorious for that sort of thing. Look at the Linux Documentation Project. The installation how to was written in 1999 and has not been updated since. I use Debian and know enough about it from use over the years to do most anything, but when I have to have an OS with top-notch documentation, I turn to OpenBSD or FreeBSD. Both of these projects blow Linux documentation out of the water. Very high-quality and accurate. Their man pages are awesome.

I'm not sure if it helps, sometimes it does for me, but if you do a google search for something and the results seem out of date, you can click on the show options link and show results sorted on the latest, past 24 hours, past week, etc.

Interestingly enough, your comment above shows up as the top result for the latest search for "ubuntu ntp":

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=ubuntu%20ntp&tbs=rltm...

Do they subscribe to the HN RSS or index the site that quickly, pretty interesting.

This is one of the reasons Jeff and Joel made Stack Overflow - so that pages can improve over time by whoever has useful information, while keeping the same URL and building "Google juice"

Why? Let's wait some time and Google is going to prioritize fresher content more. They should not have any problems with assigning dates to blog posts.

Actually, "Specific date range" is step in this direction.

Edit: The interesting point is that the writing is now have to be much more iterative than it was few years ago. Content is now nearly always "work in progress".

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