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Comment by tedd-the-tiger | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely hate it when a blog doesn't have a date or has incomplete dates. When was this posted?

Someone else here posted a link to a related post (https://back7.co/home/raspberry-pi-recovery-kit). A "related article" has the title "Project Retrospective: Raspberry Pi Field Unit from 2015". No idea which year this was posted either.

Too much whitespace and too much scrolling.

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>I absolutely hate it when a blog doesn't have a date or has incomplete dates. When was this posted?

Depending on the CMS authoring tool used, sometimes the raw HTML ("View Source") has meta info of the timestamp. In this particular case, the raw html has this:

  <meta itemprop="datePublished" content="2020-08-25T18:00:00-0700"/>

Obviously, any meta timestamp is self-reported so you have to judge if it's a legitimate date (e.g. possibly cross-reference with archive on Wayback Machine, etc.).

The web landing page also shows "Aug 25" in light gray underneath this story's photo: https://back7.co/

Also it features a Pi 4 so it can't be older than June 2019.

(but yes, I do share your frustration and sometimes spend more time looking for ANY date than reading an article...)

I agree with you in general.

In this case, though, the article talks about "a few months over the quarantine" and "including a 3 month break due to life and COVID impacts". That makes it pretty easy to date!

That doesn't make it easier for me to date at all.

For one, I probably don't live where this guy lives - the quarantine timeframe has been different everywhere.

But it won't in four years.

Are we going to get another COVID?

Another outbreak is possible, possibly meaning more quarantine.

One common thing I've noticed from working in web publishing for the past couple of decades is that design is often created to serve the frequent homepage reader who is familiar with your publication, not the first-time entrant who came in via an individual page. The unstated assumption is that you will start on the homepage, and navigate from there to the article you want to read. Leaving the year off of the article isn't an anti-pattern to them because it should be clear that it's recent from the fact that you found it on their homepage.

Never mind that this rarely matches with reality. Even with pretty comprehensive web analytics to show actual usage patterns, it's common for site developers, designers, and publishers to make decisions based on this unconscious bias.

This is good feedback, thank you. I'll add the date at the top of the article in the article text from now on, and should be able to go back and update old articles. As for whitespace, it's the CMS and template. I am able to create projects like these because I can leverage a CMS (Squarespace here). My projects usually get picked up/noticed when they are live, no one usually looks at my older stuff. Cheers!

Here's a great feature for a browser add-on - perhaps something that takes a look at the Wayback Machine, or google cache, or something, and gives you a little hint in one of the page corners that tells you when was the last time this page has been updated, or when it was created in the first place.

For something like this, which does not include time-sensitive material, why does a date matter? This is as close to timeless content as you’re like to find WRT a Raspberry Pi case project.

Many research papers are undated too. It’s aggravating, but I can see why authors do it (especially for any blogs with ad revenue attached).

It says "Aug 25" in grayish letters under the image.

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