The Blog Timestamp is Dying | Hacker News Reader

The Blog Timestamp is Dying

graysky.org

8 pointschampion5 comments

I was hoping that the author would be complaining about this, but they didn't. That is unfortunate. The date something was written is a very important part of its context. This is one thing newspapers get right, and a lot of "web journalism" gets very very wrong. I've noticed this more and more as the web gets older and older -- I want to know the date something was published, and that information is really hard to come by a lot of the time.

I keep the month and year in my permalinks for that very reason. I want people to be able to get a sense, right away, of whether something is still likely to be valid. If I'm writing "evergreen" content or a page that's going to be updated over time, I make it a page, not a blog post. I usually add a small update log, too.

If you blog, you _want_ dates in there. It means that if you change your mind years later (and this happens!) and someone quotes you from a really old post (and possibly out of context), you can say, "That was years ago! Here's what I think now: ...". People are human, people change. If you're writing about tech, it's doubly important to keep dates in there - versions shift _so_ much over time.

I handle the logical vs chronological connections through writing pages and blog posts that link to resources, updating old blog posts with links, and keeping a manual index.

I have mixed feelings about it. I certainly think it is helpful to know when something with published for the context you mean. I think it also probably makes sense to lead less with it for content that isn't that time-sensitive.

The broader point is that I think people will organize their content less around timestamps and more around relevance, the reader, etc.

You cannot know whether the date the content was published will be relevant for a reader or not. It is not your assessment of timeliness that matters, but the reader's. So in the interest of doing the right thing, don't obscure the date.

TL;DR: A small rant about why I find most of the points in the blog shallow, misleading, dangerous and downright doomsday-ish at times.

YMMV. Discussions and arguments are welcome. Name-calling will be ignored. Trolls will not be fed.

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> Downplaying the timestamp attempts to make the content appear more evergreen.

This is dangerous.

Imagine a newbie developer landing on one of your old posts looking for directions on something. Unfortunately for her, there isn't any other relevant material available anywhere else on the web. Also, whatever you wrote in that post was was relevant only for a few weeks after it was written. Can you imagine the anguish you'd be putting them through because they tried to follow your directions and failed miserably?

Before you claim it to be an edge-case, I've fallen prey to the same situation many times in my search for such elusive knowledge.

Personally, this is one of the reason I HATE the non-availability of time-stamps, especially on tech blogs. What the hell are you trying to say? That your code is perfect and won't need to change ever? You aren't fooling me, rather, you are fooling yourself.

> RSS is dying.

RSS isn't dying, sorry.

Tracking google search trends isn't a good way to measure how popular RSS - or anything, for that matter - is. A simple explanation could be that because more people know about RSS today than a few years ago, searching for it is no longer necessary. Almost everyone knows about Hurricane Katrina, but they don't search for it everyday, do they?

The consumption of RSS has changed, though.

Until a few years ago, feeds used to be the ONLY way to consume RSS. Then mashups happened. Then APIs became ubiquitous. PubSubHubbub, JSON & JSONP have flourished in recent times. All of these were 'derived' (in a broad sense) from RSS.

Oh, and before you point to Google Reader, allow me to make an anticipatory point. Google shut down Reader because they didn't find it worth the effort to monetize - it had nothing to do with the consumption of RSS. Even till the very last day, there were people clamoring for Google to continue or hunting for a suitable GReader replacement. In what way does that strike you as the 'death' of RSS?

Almost every site out there, that updates regularly maintains a feed. Except Twitter, of course. But then, Twitter implementing an RSS feed isn't adding much anyway. Their existing consumption patterns and the ecosystem around them is robust enough to do without RSS and Atom feeds.

If anything, I agree that RSS is very unidirectional, but that's where I believe PubSubHubbub can make a difference. In fact, if I may be so bold, I'd say that RSS is evolving and PubSubHubbub is one of its evolutionary intermediates.

With the insane number of consumption platforms and our burning desire to instantly know everything, I wouldn't be surprised if, sooner or later, someone finds a new way to consume RSS & Atom feeds.

I have already begun this process for myself by building @updt_me - I now consume all my RSS & Atom feeds through Twitter. Yeah, that was a plug but hey, it also happens to be extremely relevant.

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