Skip to content

Musings of an Anonymous Geek

Made with only the finest 1's and 0's

Menu
  • About
  • Search Results
Menu

If You Don’t Date Your Work, It Sucks.

Posted on January 18, 2010 by bkjones

I probably get more upset than is reasonable when I come across articles with no date on them. I scroll furiously for a few minutes, try to see if the date was put in some stupid place like the fine print written in almost-white-on-white at the bottom of the post surrounded by ads. Then I skim the article looking for references to software versions that might clue me in on how old this material is. Then I check the sidebars to see if there’s some kind of “About this Post” block. Finally, I make a mental note of the domain in a little mental list I use to further filter my Google searches in the future. Then I close the browser window in disgust. If it weren’t completely gross and socially unacceptable to do so, I would spit on the floor every time this happened.

Why would you NOT date your articles? In almost every single theme for every single content management solution written in any language and backed by any database, “Date” is a default element. Why would you remove it? It is almost guaranteed to be more work to remove it. Why would you go through actual work to make your own writing less useful to others?

What happens when you don’t date your articles?

  1. People have no idea whether your article has anything to do with what they’re working on.  If you wrote an article about the Linux kernel in 1996, it’s of no use to me *now*, even if it was pretty hardcore at the time.
  2. Readers are forced to skim your article looking for references to software versions to see if your article is actually meaningful to them or not. Why make it hard for people to know whether your article is useful? The only reason I can think of is that you already know your articles are old, so not dating them insures that people at least skim enough to see some of the ads on your site. You are irreversibly lame if you do this.
  3. It causes near seizures in people like me who really hate when you don’t date your work, as well as all of your past teachers, who no doubt demanded that you sign and date your work.
  4. Every time you don’t date an article online, a seal pup is clubbed to death in the arctic, and a polar bear gets stranded on a piece of ice.

At some point, I will make an actual list of web sites that regularly do not date their work. A sort of hall of shame for sites that fail to link their writing to some kind of time-based context. If you have sites you’d like to add, let me know in the comments.

Share this:

  • Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook

Recent Posts

  • Auditing Your Data Migration To ClickHouse Using ClickHouse Local
  • ClickHouse Cheat Sheet 2024
  • User Activation With Django and Djoser
  • Python Selenium Webdriver Notes
  • On Keeping A Journal and Journaling
  • What Geeks Could Learn From Working In Restaurants
  • What I’ve Been Up To
  • PyCon Talk Proposals: All You Need to Know And More
  • Sending Alerts With Graphite Graphs From Nagios
  • The Python User Group in Princeton (PUG-IP): 6 months in

Categories

  • Apple
  • Big Ideas
  • Books
  • CodeKata
  • Database
  • Django
  • Freelancing
  • Hacks
  • journaling
  • Leadership
  • Linux
  • LinuxLaboratory
  • Loghetti
  • Me stuff
  • Other Cool Blogs
  • PHP
  • Productivity
  • Python
  • PyTPMOTW
  • Ruby
  • Scripting
  • Sysadmin
  • Technology
  • Testing
  • Uncategorized
  • Web Services
  • Woodworking

Archives

  • January 2024
  • May 2021
  • December 2020
  • January 2014
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • February 2012
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • June 2011
  • April 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • September 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • September 2006
  • August 2006
  • July 2006
  • June 2006
  • April 2006
  • March 2006
  • February 2006
  • January 2006
  • December 2005
  • November 2005
  • October 2005
  • September 2005
  • August 2005
  • July 2005
  • June 2005
  • May 2005
  • April 2005
  • March 2005
  • February 2005
  • January 2005
  • December 2004
  • November 2004
  • October 2004
  • September 2004
  • August 2004
© 2025 Musings of an Anonymous Geek | Powered by Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme