Why I Don’t Date Stamp My Blog Articles

Great way to make your articles unciteable.

I remember reading the same blog post in 1997, kinda makes you wonder

See, I take the opposite view for the same reason. I see the contextual information like date as informative in my own posts and in others. An outrageous post looks less outrageous posted in a time when our knowledge of the world was different. Insight that's on the mark is that much more prescient if someone made it well before anyone else saw that same insight.

I think there are probably good reasons not to provide context for your posts, just like there are times that it makes more sense to post anonymously (or pseudonymously), but I don't think this post makes a good case for removing context like post date by default.

> My article Twitter Marketing Tips has always had good momentum considering when it was first published (guess). I know if I published the date… people would think “dude, this is so old… things must have moved on”.

And when things do move on in such a way to make those tips invalid, people will keep finding that article and be misled.

The simple solution is to put a "last updated" date on your article (or at least a last updated year). Then every few months or every year or so, go through and update the last updated date if the article is still relevant.

That's not very clever. Nothing is more annoying than the absence of a timestamp on an article. Often I don't even bother reading such articles.