The other day I happened upon a really fine Blog as I was doing some research. Most of the information was well thought-out and linked. However, I was thinking to myself that some of this material reads like it might be dated. If so, it’s material that if dated, read more like it was written yesterday.
I searched around for a bit trying to get a feel for current events and could find none. I finally let it go as I could not use the material if I could not establish a date. Pretty frustrating!
It got me to thinking about how Bloggers date their material. I for one, date all of my material and remove all of it after about 3 years time ( I’m kinda skiddish’ about dealing with large relational databases anyway ). I figure that its dated by that point anyway, and with Google indexing Tweets and Facebook Posts, it looks like the search engines are more interested in what is going on socially in real time, than any post that is over 3 year of age. And unless I’m actually looking for a “Mechanical” piece of information, I usually read the latest posts on most Blogs that I visit.
Most Bloggers that I have come up through the ranks with have long since moved on to other ventures. Not earning an income at Blogging within a couple of years and they are soon looking for greener pastures. However, not wanting to close the door on all the hard work that they have done, they remove the dates from their posts so that no one can see that’s it’s been 8 years since their last post.
If you have a Blog of poetry, you can skip the dating, as poetry is timeless. However, if you have a Tech Blog, do us all a favor and leave the dates of your postings in place, even if you leave your Blog!