Include a date on your blog posts
Posted 10th September 2020
Aside from the article itself, the most important thing to include on every blog post is the date it was published.
A date goes without saying for blogs that feature diary style posts, where each post is bound to a particular moment in time, but I see a lot of blogs that don’t have a date stamp.
Blogs can contain all sorts of content, so I suppose those that include evergreen advice, for example Zen Habits, can get away with it, but in the web and software development industry things move so fast that advice can go out of date very quickly.
If I’m searching the web and come across a blog post with what looks like the answer I was looking for, but doesn’t have a date, I question its reliability; what if:
- the feature has been deprecated or replaced, like 3D Touch on iPhones
- this code or technique was a hack and there’s now a proper solution, like implicit ARIA roles on the
<address>element in Safari
With a date, the visitor has the reassurance that the feature, code or technique they’re researching is brand new, or if it’s, say, five years old, some more digging may be worthwhile to ensure it’s still the relevant.