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Comment by ezy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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