If I don't see a date, I just don't read it.
Use Timestamps
31–40 of 163 posts
Re: Use Timestamps
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think it is even possible to display the full URL by default in Safari on iOS.
I don’t know which model you have, but on mine you wouldn’t even have the space to display more than a 5-6 characters after the domain name.
Funnily, the post's example.of https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/02/28/some-notes-on-using-nix/ means I can see clearly the date and nothing more in my Firefox/Android URL bar
Re: Use Timestamps
#33I ran into a fun bug last week. I wrote a piece of .Net Core software that accepts a batch of transactions. The transactions are shovelled into Sql Server without much processing. Each transaction had a timestamp set to DateTime.UtcNow in C#. I didn't expect the transactions to end up with duplicate timestamps but DateTime.UtcNow only has a resolution of between 0.5 and 15 milliseconds. So in a tight loop I got dupli…
Timestamps no matter how precise don't show you the true order. If ordinality is so important then you should be using something else that guarantees ordinality, like an incrementing ID or something, not timestamps.
Re: Use Timestamps
#34I don't understand how people can accept the browser hiding the URL.
Firefox seems to always display the url after the protocol, even on mobile. I don't like the protocol omission, but I've grown to tolerate it.
Or mayhap, been forced to tolerate it? By UI freakazoids?
(A scream goes out)Function before form, always!
Re: Use Timestamps
#35It's something that I agree with and increasingly I add dates in my notes. In addition to that, using one single format is really important. if the article was published on say November 2nd. I wouldn't know if it was 11th February or 2nd November. DD MMM YYYY is safest. The 3Ms being Jan, Feb, Mar....
You can just use ISO 8601, YYYY-MM-DD, then you can be international standards compliant as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
Plus, it sorts naturally.
Starting with the day or the month is Ludacris.
Re: Use Timestamps
#36Not everything is written at a given point in time and then forgotten about. There are many texts that are continuously updated over years and even decades.
You can include an edit timestamp.
Re: Use Timestamps
#37Not everything is written at a given point in time and then forgotten about. There are many texts that are continuously updated over years and even decades.
A bit like a file with a created and updated timestamp then?
Re: Use Timestamps
#38I’ve found that internal documentation is a great place to put timestamps. People often complain that eg architecture pictures or design documents tend to go out of date, as if that’s somehow a big enough problem to not make them. Instead, consider making whatever documentation seems useful at a given moment and timestamp it with a clear, prominent “this was accurate on yyyy-mm-dd”. It will still be useful a year lat…
Addendum: don’t rely on your git/wiki/document-system for tracking the timestamp. “This was accurate on $DATE” has a very different meaning than “this document was last edited on $DATE”. It might be 2 years out of date but someone fixed a typo last week.
Just put a sentence/textbox somewhere with the date. If someone does a proper update, they will proudly edit that sentence too.
Re: Use Timestamps
#39Amen to that! It's really frustrating when a date is not put there, especially on tech topics. If no tech version is written explicitly either, you are left wondering "will this still apply to my case or is it something super-old?" But beside selfish use-cases like looking for an answer to a problem, it is something that was already solved in the previous form of knowledge distribution: books. Why do we always take o…
> But beside selfish use-cases like looking for an answer to a problem, it is something that was already solved in the previous form of knowledge distribution: books. Why do we always take one step back when moving forward? Note that with book you have the publication date, but you don’t know when each chapter was written. This doesn’t matter for most books, but for highly technical subjects it may matter.
That's a fair point but I would expect - at least from high quality book - that all the book chapters are up to date when first published.
Re: Use Timestamps
#40Needs a (2023)