My blog is a digital garden, not a blog
joelhooks.com
joelhooks.com
* Nobody reads posts in chronological order. At best, they will find a post through a search engine or link and maybe glance at your homepage once. The most popular page on my site (by far) was something I wrote 3 years ago - it still gets hits but that doesn't translate into regular readers.
* Nobody really follows blogs by subscribing to feeds. OK, obviously some people do but it is small fraction of site readers. And of those that do, only a small fraction regularly visit the sites they are subscribed to.
The upshot is that you are better thinking of your blog as a set of independent articles rather than an actual Web Log. Publication dates are important to gauge how up-to-date the information is but almost no-one is going to scroll through a date-sorted index.
If you want users to browse around after they have read the first article, implement some sort of Related Articles or tagging system to arrange your content by topic.
No, people don't. Google however, does. Good SEO tells you to put a date based path in the URL (and in the page metadata). This helps Google work out how fresh your content is. If someone asks Google 'xyz' and you have a recent post about 'xyz' you will be ranked higher than many other 'xyz' posts.
Google should know when the web page was first posted or last updated, simply by crawling.
And trusting a date in the URL just opens up the ability to game and abuse the system.
SEO is providing the ability for your webpage to be crawled easier so it can appear in Google's searches.
If you don't want people coming to your site, then yeah, don't do it?
What matters is the writing not the web page. Once a writer thinks about the web page their writing suffers.
I write because I write. It might help to think about an analogy to growing flowers in the garden instead of cash crops like cotton, tobacco, or weed. While cash crop husbandry is interesting in and of itself what cash crops produce is cash. Of course cash is useful but it’s one of the less interesting things a person can spend their time making and thinking in terms of cash tends to make people a bit tedious to be around, well at least it makes them so for me because they’re often preoccupied with Bol Weevils and spot market prices and the cost of diesel for the truck and payroll taxes.
On the other hand, when a flower gardener looks up from their work they are likely to say something practical in general like “I’m thirsty” and occasionally something about our shared experience such as the weather. But sometimes they say something insightful because of all the time they spent not thinking about all the things one must think about because those things are part of what “growing cash crops” means when someone says it and they are not part of what “a flower garden” means.
I enjoy writing. I write because I write. I write because writing is productive. I write because writing produces interesting things.
I wrote this with my thumbs because my phone was in my hand when I read your comment. I just got on with the work. I didn’t futz with switching devices to use my Unicomp model M keyboard because doing so would have changed what I wrote by forcing me to write faster. Not actually forcing me of course but the interruption would require me to chase what I was thinking instead of thinking it. And of course the model M is an awesome weapon for arguing the internet. So awesome that the pleasure of forum combat would also change what I write. Buckling springs machine gun clicking like the old days.
So I optimize for doing this because this is what I do but that means not optimizing in the ways people mean when they say “optimization” in regard to writing on the web. It means optimizing with the premise that writing this matters and is the goal and that it was a productive day looks like. YMMV.
If we think about this logically, it makes sense that putting content into formats that the webscraping bot recognizes would score better than formats that it doesn't recognize.
For what it's worth, you can also put the date in semantic html tags. [0, 1, 2] Not only is this pretty easy, it also makes the site more accessible to people who use screen readers, etc. Here is how I do it (statically generated). [3]
[0]: https://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_semantic_elements.asp
[1]: http://schema.org/Article
[2]: https://schema.org/datePublished
[3]: https://github.com/azah/personal-site-public/blob/master/pos...
Living in the imaginary world where fame and fortune come from Google search results is easier than facing the blank page.
In reality Google knows perfectly well when the page was created (or first seen by their spider, which is almost the same thing these days) without relying on metadata.
If this article was posted in 2018, things have changed a little bit since 2020...
Also, I think for better or worse, as internet surfers, we've come to expect things to be somewhat sorted chronologically as default, so unless you're pulling some 'highlight' articles out to feature etc, we're conditioned to expect the list/index as date sorted for the most part....
[0]: https://gwern.net
Especially when using time-relative words like "lately", I always check out the date of the post to see how relevant this piece is.
In addition to displaying a date on the post, I also appreciate dates above the content[0].
It's fine to have a curated homepage though.
I care, because it gives me context of how relevant it might be.
Most peoples personal websites today are a series of articles, so of course dating them is reasonable, and sorting by it is also nice for the reader.
Even online manuals, which should not be organized around chronology benefit greatly by having dates on them.
We rarely see the 90's style homepages with "Here is my a list of my favourite episodes" and "This is my gallery of my favourite cats" anymore. But if you want to make your home on the web more about themes, than articles, then great.
Would you (as a reader) prefer my trip to Norway to be dated when it happened, or when I published the article?
I am mostly wanting to blog to curate my memories of things I done or thoughts I've had but I'd be lying if I didn't also hope it might help me make 'friends' online and find people with common interests.
As in if you are writing about a trip in 2002 and the page is written as if you wrote it soon after the trip then the date of publishing is not really essential (in terms of semantic html I think it would still be good etiquette to have is "somewhere" on the page, like in a footer, tagged as such, same thing for a "last updated" date)
In this case I would say that is would be nice as a reader if I can understand what the date mean and if it was backdated or not.
For the lamentation of chronological posts on here, don't see the big deal, you can tweak your website to have tag based or category based view too fairly easily; I have switched my website to have category based as the default view long ago but also offer chronological and feel quite happy with result: http://www.andreykurenkov.com/writing/
Basically it’s a wiki of things that I stumble upon and want to learn later (mostly from HN).
It’s not so interesting for general reading, but the cheat sheets and code snippets get a lot of use from my friends in tech (and from google it seems).
I figure at the end of my life it will be a fairly complete knowledge base of everything I’ve ever learned
> Seriously, who cares when anything on my site got posted.
One could argue it depends what the subject matter is. If it's about a javascript framework, I do need to see that date. What I have now is a boolean I look at for each post, which controls if the date is shown in the post listings (it is always shown on the post itself).
Another argument is the date is relevant because it gives context to the discussion. Of course it would matter if a piece was written in 1829, 1929, or 1931, or even particular months in a year. Posts (and people...) don't exist in a vacuum.
When I last looked into static site generators Zola attracted my attention so I'm curious to know what your experience with it was.
Thanks!
I'm migrating because I wanted to use asciidoctor instead of markdown, and hugo has better support. However I have to maintain a custom fork to get custom params to the asciidoc renderer, and to support asciidoc-diagrams. As far as I'm aware Rust has no good asciidoc crate so I would have to shave the yak and write my own implementation. Yuk.
Zola and Hugo are very similar in features, except for i18n. For most people this isn't an issue, and it's being worked on for Zola.
Also, Zola is written in Rust and Hugo in Go, so one might be more comfortable extending / forking one over the other.
You can check out many Zola examples here [0] and the source code for my website here [1].
[0]: https://github.com/getzola/zola/blob/master/EXAMPLES.md
I like the word "garden" for this style of personal site, I might start using that.
I get the feeling and someone else who knows more should say I am off base that static site generators/blogging systems are easier to setup/use/customize?
But yup I agree with your question, why not use a wiki... and I think the answer is interesting.
To me it only seems to have downsides: Not using my local text editor and having to worry about web security.
Why not just put some Markdown into a git repo?
again, the killer thing for me is the portability. vim in a terminal is only nice when I have a keyboard; if I want to keep track of a movie a friend's recommending when I have my phone, being able to pull it up is great.
also, plugins are key. org-roam has this for org-mode, but I haven't seen anything for vim that's as smooth as the backlinks setup I have in tiddlywiki, which is something like https://giffmex.org/gifts/tiddlyblinkexample.html at the bottom of each note, autodisplaying snippets of context from other notes around links to that note. I also have it display a list of links to notes tagged with the name of that note. none of that is in the markdown files, just the view layer.
- A single markdown (soon ASCIIdoc) converted to a single html page with pandoc and a little css markdown - Autogenerated TOC at the top if I want to link someone to a section, which is just an anchor. I use ctrl+f for myself - It is 188K and has no pictures so it works perfectly on slow connections. 50 pages if printed to PDF
Sorting by date, CTA, content strategies, etc. come after you have answered those questions. Then you can focus on how best you can make your content and your readers meet.